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SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 



SIZING UP 
UNCLE SAM 



VESTPOCKET ESSAYS (NOT 

ESPECIALLY SERIOUS) ON 

THE UNITED STATES 

BY 

GEORGE FITCH 

AUTHOR OF "at GOOD OLD SIWASh/' ETC. 




NEW YORK 

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



Copyright^ 1914, hy 
Frederick A. Stokes Company 



All rights reserved, including that of translation into 
foreign languages. 



JU3S0346 




September, 1914 



SEP (21914 



DEFENSE BY THE AUTHOR! 

May it Please the Reader: 

For the past three years I have been writing little bun- 
dles of words on various themes ranging from " Hope " to 
" Hash " and from " Cabbages " to " Kings." George 
Matthew Adams, the Syndicate Man, is really the one to 
blame because he made me do it, but if the reader forgives 
him, so do I. 

Among the thousand-odd subjects upon which I have 
written, very many have pertained to the United States, its 
glories and peculiarities, due to the fact that I am seven- 
teen-tenths American myself. I have decided to bale up a 
collection of these so that the reader may soak up, at one 
sitting, incredible amounts of information regarding his 
native land. 

I have obtained this information from encyclopaedias, blue 
books, census reports, the World Almanac, railway time 
tables, lunch counter bills of fare, sign boards, advertise- 
ments, hearsay, suspicion, conjecture and the charges made 
in the heat of a campaign. Of the five million or more of 
readers of the newspapers in which these essays have ap- 
peared, about half have written me at various times, cor- 
recting mistakes and inaccuracies. If any mistakes remain, 
therefore, they are plainly the fault of the other 2,500,000 
readers who have neglected their opportunity to set me right. 

I submit these essays to the reader not with the idea of 
embarrassing any other authorities or of producing revolu- 
tions or reforms, but in the three- fold belief: 

V 



VI 



DEFENSE BY THE AUTHOR 



First — that the essays may be taken in liberal doses 
without especial harm. 

Second — that much of what is contained in them is true. 
Third — that a number of facts herein contained are 
making their first appearance in public. 

Yours very truly, 

George Fitch. 



CONTENTS 



STATES 

New York — The Greatest State . . 
Virginia — The Proudest State . . 
South Carolina— The Scrappiest State 
Colorado— The Tallest State . . 
Texas — The Biggest State . . . 
Washington — The Dampest State . 
Kentucky — The Touchiest State 
Kansas — The Loudest State . 
Arizona — The Youngest State . . 
Ohio — The Home of Our Relatives . 
Illinois— The Producer of Chicago . 
California— The Tourist's Paradise 
Pennsylvania — Headquarters for Heat 
Indiana — Provider of Vice-Presidents 
Missouri — The Old-Fashioned State . 
Massachusetts — The Largest State for 

Size 

Maine— The Right Bower . . . 
Florida— The Southeast Bower . . 



Its 



3 

5 

7 

9 
11 
13 
15 
17 
19 
21 
23 
25 
27 
29 
31 

33 
35 
37 



II CITIES 

New Orleans ^^ 

Pittsburg 

Chicago 

Los Angeles 

New York City 

Seattle 

Washington 

Philadelphia 

San Francisco 

Kansas City 

Boston 



43 
45 
47 
49 
51 
53 
55 
57 
59 
61 



viii CONTENTS 



III DONATIONS FROM NATURE page 

The Rocky Mountains 65 

Niagara Falls 67 

The Mississippi River 69 

The Grand Canyon 71 

The Great Salt Lake 73 

Yellowstone Park 75 

IV ARC LIGHTS IN OUR HISTORY 

George Washington 79 

Abraham Lincoln 81 

Benjamin Franklin 83 

Thomas Jefferson 85 

Ulysses S. Grant 87 

Henry Clay 89 

Alexander Hamilton 91 

John Quincy Adams 93 

Andrew Jackson 95 

V LEADING CITIZENS 

WooDRow Wilson 99 

Theodore Roosevelt 101 

Thomas A. Edison 103 

Jane Addams 105 

William J. Bryan 107 

John D. Rockefeller 109 

Cornelius J. McGillicuddy Ill 

Judge Lynch 113 

Colonel Bogie 115 

VI POLITICAL PHENOMENA 

Senators 119 

Congressmen 121 

The President 123 

Standpatters 125 

Booms 127 

The Electoral College 129 

Judges 131 

Vice Presidents 133 



CONTENTS ix 



VII CHIEF PRODUCTS page 

Corn 137 

Tobacco .......... 139 

Hogs 141 

Pie . 143 

Slang 145 

Office Seekers 147 

VIII EXCLUSIVE FEATURES 

The Quick Lunch Counter 151 

Greek Letter Societies 153 

Broadway 155 

The Baseball Fan 157 

The Star Spangled Banner . . . .159 

The Glorious Fourth 161 

Elevators 163 

College Spirit 165 

Country Clubs 167 

The Ham Sandwich 169 

Skyscrapers 171 

IX FADS 

Bath Tubs 175 

Ancestors 177 

Population 179 

Divorce 181 

X PASTIMES 

Baseball 185 

Football 187 

Corn Husking 189 

Treating 191 

Getting Rich 193 

XI BRAGGING POINTS 

The Panama Canal 197 

Push 199 

Independence 201 

Ambition 203 

Reformers 205 



CONTENTS 



XII DRAWBACKS page 

Tornadoes 209 

Revolvers 211 

Wall Street 213 

Pullman Porters 215 

Imported Husbands . 217 

Cabarets ..... 219 

Waste 221 

Extravagance 223 

Railway Stations 225 

XIII PROBLEMS 

Ex-Presidents 229 

The Tariff 231 

Sleeping Cars 233 

City Halls 235 

The Standing Army ...... 237 



STATES 

There are forty-eight States in this country 
and each one has some separate and distinct 
excuse for extreme pride. Formerly each 
State was a principality, jealous of all the 
others. Now we are all one family and the 
only real use for State lines is to enable the 
dining-car waiters to tell when to stop serv- 
ing liquor. 

The States range in size from Rhode 
Island, which is so small that the voters mis- 
laid it for years and have only recently dis- 
covered it in Mr. Aldrich's personal effects, 
to Texas which has four climates and several 
million acre cow pastures. And they range in 
population from New York with ten million 
people to Nevada where a man sometimes has 
to travel 200 miles on foot to find enough 
company to pick a quarrel. 



SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 



NEW YORK STATE 

THE GREATEST STATE 

NEW YORK is known as the Empire State, be- 
cause of the vast numbers of money kings, rail- 
road kings, steel kings, theater kings and mis- 
cellaneous potentates which it harbors. It is a medium 
sized, quaintly designed State, containing 47,000 
square miles and over 9,000,000 people, something over 
5,000,000 of whom are jammed down in the toe of the 
State in a municipal sardine box, known as Greater 
New York. 

New York State is the greatest of American common- 
wealths. It contains more people, more factories, more 
money, more millionaires, more society, more news- 
papers, more actors, more shipping and more pohtics 
than any other State. It is 400 miles long and 300 
miles tall on the map and is divided into two parts by 
the New York Central Railroad, the Erie Canal and the 
Tammany-Sulzer squabble. It was discovered in 1609 
by Hendrick Hudson, who, however, made the great 
mistake of sailing away without picking up a few pub- 
lic service franchises cheap and made nothing from his 
find. It was first settled about 1614 and in the last 100 
years has grown so rapidly that Congress has had to 
be enlarged ten times to take care of its ever-increasing 
horde of representatives. 



4 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

The State of New York itself is commonly supposed 
to be only a sort of back yard for the city of New 
York, but this is only because the city does all of the 
talking. The back yard contains over 4,000,000 peo- 
ple, and when they are having a political campaign it is 
impossible to hear anything else in the country. New 
York always votes for the successful presidential can- 
didate for the same reason that a fat boy always 
sits on the lower end of a teeter totter. 

New York State contains three mountain ranges, the 
Catskills, Adirondacks and lower Broadway. It con- 
tains the Hudson River, which is a broad, magnificent 
stream superbly decorated with mountain sides, ice 
houses and brick barges. It has a half interest in Ni- 
agara Falls and Lake Champlain and Andrew Carnegie. 
It also contains the oldest hving Ex-president, but has 
been unable to harness him as successfully as it has 
Niagara Falls. 

New York State produces more butter and eggs, 
milk, dividends, magazines, battleships, clothing and 
newspaper stories than any other State. It was orig- 
inally infested with Indians, but they have all been 
rooted out except the Tammany tribe, which, however, 
has done more damage than all the others put together. 



STATES 



VIRGINIA 

THE PROUDEST STATE 

THE State of Virginia is a pleasant, fertile land, 
watered by rivers with noble and sonorous names, 
and located below the Potomac River, well out of 
the frosted ear belt. It is shaped like a railroad snow 
plow, and contains 40,000 square miles, a great num- 
ber of which are occupied by mountains, which are not 
grand enough to attract tourists, nor valuable enough 
to pay for their board and keep. 

Virginia occupies a prominent place in the front row 
of States in American history, being perpetually jostling 
with Massachusetts for the spotlight. It was first set- 
tled in 1604, to the intense disgust of Massachusetts, 
which didn't get around to this duty until 1620. It 
became the greatest of the colonies, shipping vast quan- 
tities of tobacco to England, and containing many 
great estates well stocked with slaves and aristocrats. 
It took a very prominent part in the Revolution, and 
Patrick Henry was the first American to allude to the 
British administration in terms of seething discontent. 
Massachusetts began the Revolution at Concord, but 
Virginia finished it up at Yorktown. Massachusetts 
supplied Samuel Adams and John Hancock, but Vir- 
ginia supplied George Washington. Massachusetts 
chants the praises of Plymouth and Miles Standish, but 
Virginia comes right back with Jamestown and Captain 
John Smith, throwing in Pocahontas for good measure. 
Whenever a Virginia man and a Massachusetts man get 



6 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

together and begin discussing history, Andrew Carne- 
gie digs up for another wing on the peace temple at the 
Hague. 

At the time of the Civil War, Virginia was the great- 
est of the Southern States, and Richmond became the 
capital of the Confederacy. This caused a great deal of 
running to and fro over the State by infantry, cavalry 
and artillery for four years, and the splendid planta- 
tions and fertile valleys got so badly trampled under 
foot that they have never recovered. For many years 
afterward Virginia was a sad ruin, but she has lately 
been making an earnest effort to come back, and has 
now passed the 2,000,000 mark in population. 

Virginia's chief crops have been tobacco, old families 
and presidents. It gave the nation four of its first five 
presidents, and later slipped in the fifth. Afterwards 
when the soil refused to produce presidents, a rotation 
of crops was tried, a captain of industry, Thomas Ryan, 
and later President Wilson, having been produced lately 
with great success. Virginia is also getting interested 
in railroads, coal mines and steel mills, and many of 
its grand old plantation mansions will soon be occupied 
by brand new millionaires. 



STATES 



SOUTH CAROLINA 

THE SCRAPPIEST STATE 

SOUTH CAROLINA is a State of perpetual irri- 
tation, situated between Georgia and North Car- 
olina, and somewhere between the Revolution and 
the Civil War. It is the fightinist State in the Union, 
and is the unsafest spot between the Atlantic and the 
Pacific in which to discuss the Emancipation Proclama- 
tion or to edit a newspaper with a trenchant pen. 

South Carolina contains S0,000 square miles, 
is shaped Like a five-cent cut of pie, and has 1,500,000 
people, including Republicans and Chinese. The pop- 
ulation is almost equally divided between whites and 
negroes, but one white Carolinian when he gnashes his 
teeth and draws in his breath with a low, hissing sound 
can make 100 colored residents go away in search of 
rest and a change of climate without waiting for the 
next train. 

South Carolina has always been noted for its nerv- 
ous disposition and its willingness to rise up and smite 
the universe on all occasions. The British were having 
an easy time in the Revolution when they struck South 
Carolina, but General Marion soon made them look 
like a Republican who has criticised General Lee in 
Charleston, The State helped win the Revolution, but 
threatened to take its doll things and go home in Jack- 
son's administration, and in 1861 it opened the Civil 
War by seceding with a prodigious explosion. Later 
it contributed Tillman to the United States Senate 



8 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

and has listened to the uproarious results with pride 
ever since. South Carolina was severely shaken by an 
earthquake in 1886, but did not secede at that time. 

South Carolina raises cotton, rice and sweet potatoes, 
and supplies turpentine and resin to the world at large. 
It begins at the Atlantic Ocean in a modest way about 
six feet below high water, and for many miles inland is 
so moist that the farmers keep life belts handy on their 
wagons. It has many fine old towns, full of polite and 
chivalrous citizens, but the population peters out in 
the western mountains, where the people eat clay instead 
of ice cream and lobster, and empty the hook worms 
out of their Sunday shoes by pounding the soles with 
a stick. There are three religions in the State — 
Protestant, Catholic, and States Rights. Between 
the Savannah and the Peedee Rivers John C. Calhoun 
is still the greatest man in the world and history closes 
in 1865. 

Charleston, a beautiful petrified city on the seacoast, 
is the metropolis of South Carolina. The hope of the 
State is in its public schools, but the cotton mills, 
which are spreading all over it like a heavy rash, are 
driving hundreds of teachers out of employment. 



STATES 



COLORADO 

THE TALLEST STATE 

COLORADO is the roof garden of the United 
States. It is located a mile above the sea on 
the shoulders of the Rocky Mountains, and is 
nearly three miles high in a large number of spots. 

Colorado has 100,000 square, oblong and pyramidal 
and parallelopiped miles. Many of its miles contain 
as many as fourteen sides and some of them have up- 
wards of 5,000 acres — a thousand on each side. Half 
of Colorado is so badly broken out with mountain peaks 
that it looks like a Mastadonic picket fence to the 
reckless aviator traveling over it. Colorado trains 
travel farther going a mile than a small boy does in 
coming home from school, and there are whole counties 
where, if the daring resident lets go of the State long 
enough to moisten his hands, he will land, a total 
stranger, in another voting precinct a couple of miles 
below. 

Colorado has the grandest collection of mountains 
in the United States or almost anywhere else. Even 
the humblest citizen has scenery three times a day 
with his meals, and all the fresh and sanitary air that 
he can breathe. The mountains are stuffed with pre- 
cious metals, and while Coloradoans are digging $75,- 
000,000 a year out of their interiors, the tourists are 
clambering gayly over their exteriors with almost 
equally profitable results to the State. Colorado has 
more mines than any other State, and also more pros- 



10 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

pect holes masquerading as mines. Buying mining 
stock is the greatest Colorado dissipation and selling 
it the greatest Colorado vice. 

For many years Colorado was only good to climb over 
and fall off of and pry into with a pick. Nowadays, 
however, it contains 800,000 permanent citizens, half 
of whom are farmers. By judiciously soaking a Colo- 
rado desert in water, it can be made to produce enor- 
mous crops of apples, potatoes, sugar beets and al- 
falfa, while Colorado canteloupes are a national gastro- 
nomical feature — though Oklahoma claims that Colo- 
rado stole the Arkansas River in order to water the 
Rocky Ford region and is suing the State to get it back. 
The greatest crop in Colorado is the tourist, who ri- 
pens in June and is found over the State in vast num- 
bers, shedding $10 bills with the utmost freedom. Col- 
orado is also a natural sanitarium, and its mountain 
air, if breathed persistently, will revamp, half sole and 
entirely renovate worn-out lungs. 

Colorado was admitted to the Union in 1876 and is 
a progressive State, in which the women vote, but not 
to excess like the men. Pikes Peak, 14,100 feet high, 
is the biggest thing in Colorado, and Ben B. Lindsay, 
five feet high, the next biggest. 



STATES 11 



TEXAS 

THE BIGGEST STATE 

TEXAS is the William H. Taft of the common- 
wealths. It is the largest State in the Union 
and has by far the greatest waist measure. It 
has almost four milHon citizens, and yet there aren't 
enough of them in any one spot to make a city of 
100,000 people. All the people in the world could 
gather in Texas and there would still be room for the 
gentlemanly ushers to pass between the rows selling 
tickets for the big concert to take place after the show. 

Texas is over a thousand miles long each way, in 
places, and contains 150,000 square miles. Passenger 
trains frequently lose two days' time in passing 
through the State, and Texans die of sunstroke and 
freezing in the same afternoon. Ten thousand land 
agents have been selling farms in Texas for thirty 
years and there are still places in the State 100 miles 
from the nearest drug store. There are 13,000 miles 
of railroad in the State, and yet in some sections a 
man has to get up early and run for nearly three weeks 
in order to catch the train to town. 

When first discovered, Texas consisted mostly of 
cosmic junk, including cacti, rattlesnakes, horned 
toads, tarantulas and four kinds of climate. Later 
the greaser, a species of human invented by the Span- 
iards, moved in and the rattlesnakes moved north in 
search of better society. In the past seventy years, 
however, great improvements have been made. The 



12 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

cactus, which formerly grew over the State so thickly 
that it was impossible for a citizen to fall off his horse 
without puncturing himself in 11,000 places, is now be- 
ing replaced by onion beds, cattle ranches and corner 
lots, and the horned toads and other horrors have been 
used to promote prohibition campaigns with marked 
success. 

Texas raises cotton, rice, steers and democratic 
majorities in tremendous quantities. It is as natural 
for a Texan to be a democrat as it is for a Japanese 
to be slant-eyed. The State is governed by a legis- 
lature of great firmness and industry, whose greatest 
diversion is regulating corporations and railroads. 
It has regulated the latter so carefully that it now 
takes three corporation counsels to run a freight train 
across the State without incurring $1,000,000 in fines. 
The society for the prevention of cruelty to railroad 
presidents is growing rapidly throughout the State. 

The metropolis of Texas is San Antonio, the most 
interesting foreign city in the United States. It is 
being pushed hard by Dallas and Houston, little cities 
with deep bass voices, and by Galveston, which was 
swept away by a tidal wave twelve years ago, but which 
has come back and now dares the gulf to do it again. 



STATES 13 



THE STATE OF WASHINGTON 

THE DAMPEST STATE 

THE State of Washington, which plays left end 
on the map for this glorious republic, is a large 
and vociferous commonwealth, which is rapidly 
becoming an ex-forest and a future hot-bed for na- 
tional banks. It lies between Canada, the Columbia 
River, Idaho and the Pacific Ocean, and is shaped like 
a magazine page after the baby has finished playing 
with it. 

Thirty years ago Washington had 75,000 people, 
including Indians not washed. Now it has 1,200,000 
citizens, and is growing faster than any State, except 
Oklahoma. It was acquired by the United States in 
1803 for about five cents an acre, and was allowed to 
grow up wild until the late eighties, when enough pine 
trees were cut out to allow a few settlers to edge in and 
start real estate offices. Apple land in Washington 
now sells for $2,000 an acre and many a single pine 
tree has sold for enough to board its owner for a year. 
The Washington pine grows to a height of 300 feet, 
but is disappearing as rapidly as the Nebraska buffalo, 
thus occasioning much hard feeling among the con- 
servationists. Every time a Washington pine comes 
crashing to the ground, GifFord Pinchot sheds a large 
tear, and of late years he has had to hire a staff of 
emotional artists to help him in his rush of business. 

Washington clusters around Puget Sound, which is 
a vast and wandering body of water, too highly sea- 



14 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

soned for drinking purposes, but very beautiful when 
not irritated. Washington is seventeen days from 
Japan by four steamship lines, four days from Chi- 
cago by five transcontinental railroads, and a half a cen- 
tury from Vancouver and Victoria, just over the inter- 
national boundary line. It has a climate which is 
moist enough to drink in spots, and around Puget 
Sound the people use fish nets instead of mosquito bar 
on their windows, but the ring-tailed bhzzards of Mon- 
tana are unknown there, and its farmers go to Europe 
regularly for their summer vacations. 

Washington is one of the few American States which 
are heated by hot water. Though it is far to the north 
the Japan stream keeps it warm all winter and mitigates 
the cold shivers which the Japanese navy gives it every 
time California messes up the sacred cause of universal 
peace with another Japanese school law. 

Washington was settled by people who left all their 
old-fashioned furniture, business ideas and political 
machinery on the junk piles back in the old States. 
For this reason the State is a marvel of enterprise and 
new ideas, and the arrival from the old and experienced 
State who has come west to enlighten the natives often 
has to pocket his pride and ask the hired girl how to 
vote his first ballot. 

Walla Walla and Olympia were once the greatest 
cities of Washington, but have stood pat for many 
years, while Seattle, Tacoma and Spokane have grown 
into greatness and are equipped with every metropol- 
itan convenience, except old families. 



STATES 15 



KENTUCKY 

THE TOUCHIEST STATE 

KENTUCKY is one of the warmest American 
States, not only climatically but politically. 
It Is situated just south of the healthy repar- 
tee belt and is separated from Ohio, Indiana and Illi- 
nois by the Ohio River, which is often swum by minor- 
ity delegates in Kentucky caucuses. 

Kentucky is shaped like a suffragette shoe, and is of 
medium size, about a No. 9 on an E last. It was set- 
tled by Daniel Boone with the aid of a long rifle in 
1769, and the Daniel Boone method of settlement is 
still piously maintained in some parts of the State in 
all important questions. 

Kentucky is a wonderfully fertile region, and huge 
crops are raised whenever the inhabitants have time. 
The State is full of fast horses, beautiful women, fine 
whisky and red hot men. It has only 2,200,000 inhab- 
itants, but it could have had 5,000,000 if the early 
Kentuckian had been water-jacketed and kept below a 
shooting temperature. Men kill each other over poli- 
tics in Tennessee and over cards in Texas, and as a 
recreation in Chicago, but in Kentucky crops, politics 
and family quarrels are all fatal. The result is that 
in some districts the Kentuckian who dies in bed with 
his boots off is sat upon by the coroner, who tries to 
find the reason. 

Kentucky raises more tobacco than any other State, 
when the night rider doesn't ride. The night rider is 



i6 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

a sort of human boll weevil which gets into the crops 
and ruins them with a hoe. It travels in crowds and is 
brave and fearless wherever its opponent is unarmed. 
The feud is another Kentucky disease which has put a 
sad cramp into the population. The feud flourishes 
in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky where the rail- 
road and the Public Library do not intrude, and is a 
sort of a four generation family quarrel conducted 
with shot guns. When one feudist meets another feud- 
ist in a narrow valley and the second feudist refuses 
to sidetrack the first feudist shoots him. Then the son 
of the feudist of the second part shoots the feudist of 
the first part, and the nephew of the feudist of the first 
part shoots the son and second cousin of the feudist of 
the second part and the brother-in-law and uncle by 
marriage of the feudist of the second part catch the 
nephew and grandson and sister and cousin by marriage 
of the feudist of the first part at church and fill them 
so full of lead that they have to be taken home on a 
truck. Taking the census in Breathitt County by 
piece-work is a poorhouse job. 

Kentucky has many fine old cities and beautiful plan- 
tations. It is noted for its sunshine, its moon shine, 
its blue grass and its red noses, its mint juleps and its 
whisky. Making taxed whisky is a business in Ken- 
tucky and making un-taxed whisky is a recreation. 

There are many mountains in Kentucky but only one 
volcano — Col. Watterson of the Louisville Courier- 
Journal, 



STATES 17 



KANSAS 

THE LOUDEST STATE 

KANSAS, the geographical and atmospheric cen- 
ter of the nation, is a large rectangular state 
of mind situated just east of the Rocky Moun- 
tains, just north of the color line and just west of the 
plug hat boundary. It has 1,700,000 people, and 
would have more but for the fact that citizens fitted by 
temperament to become Kansans are scarce, and cannot 
be imported by boatloads like New Yorkers. 

Kansas consists of a large number of ideas revolving 
at a high rate of speed. Even the weather has brain 
storms in Kansas, and when a collection of wind gets 
dizzy and starts across the State in a funnel-shaped 
gyroscope, the alarmed citizens rush for the polls un- 
der the impression that another populist campaign 
is imminent. Everyone in Kansas thinks and thinks 
out loud into his neighbor's ear with a megaphone. 
Reason is King in Kansas — almost any old reason. 
Senator Ingalls, the greatest remover of epidermis ever 
known in the United States Senate, is the State's great- 
est hero, and William Allen White, who once condensed 
an essay on " What is the matter with Kansas " into 
two columns and 789 adjectives, is its prophet. 

Kansas once produced corner lots, grasshoppers and 
whiskers almost exclusively. Thirty years ago the 
rich men of the State were those who could put their 
possessions in their pockets and walk out of it while 
the poverty stricken masses had to stay behind and 



i8 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

pay taxes on 1,000 acres of land apiece. But the wild 
free air of the prairies produced thought and conver- 
sation, and this in time curdled the atmosphere and 
produced rain. After that Kansas turned its atten- 
tion to wheat, literature, and legislation, and has made 
a marked success of all three. The Kansas farmer 
would blush if he were seen in a last year's automobile, 
and the Kansas legislature regulates railroad, appe- 
tites, weather, chorus girls and politicians with equal 
skill and energy. Kansas is also famed for Its fixed 
literary stars. White, Howe and Walt Mason, who 
only visit New York once a year and then with return 
tickets safely tucked away. 

Kansas is a semi-arid state in its large cities, and is 
so dry in its small towns that visitors from St. Louis 
have to drink spring tonic all summer to keep their 
throats from season-cracking. The State has more 
college students per thousand people, sends more edit- 
ors to Congress, and has more jails which are being 
used for hen houses than any other State. It was once 
the home of bad men with nervous and hasty revolvers. 
But by allowing these citizens full play upon each 
other they were gradually exterminated, and Kansas 
now produces best sellers and reformers, and is acquir- 
ing not only tall brows, but deep pockets. It will 
never outvote the nation, but it has been out-talking it 
already for many years. 



STATES 19 



ARIZONA 

THE YOUNGEST STATE 

ARIZONA was made by Nature In a frivolous 
and contradictory mood a few million years 
ago, just to show man, when he arrived, what 
she could do when she felt like it. And man has ad- 
mitted that in the case of Arizona she has done a plenty. 
She has made rivers which are dusty on top and has 
put most of the drinking water in the State a mile 
underground. She has made red, yellow and blue des- 
erts and mountains which rise 10,000 feet high without 
any foothills or preliminaries. She made beautiful 
valleys and forgot to sweep the 1,000 ton bowlders out 
of them when she had finished. She made the mesas, 
which started out to become mountains, but became 
tired at the first story, and which have vast flat tops 
leveled off by a celestial jackplane. She made the Gila 
monster, whose looks are almost fatal. She made the 
Grand Canyon, in wliich she opened the earth's side for 
250 miles and laid bare its granite ribs. And lastly 
she covered the whole exhibition with a climate in which 
bugs and microbes cannot live, and in which a man 
has to have about ninety years' practice in order to die 
without assistance. 

Arizona is the grandfather of the continent geo- 
logically and the baby of the States politically. It 
was first settled several thousand years before the Pil- 
grim fathers came over, and many of the houses built 
by the original inhabitants are in a better state of 



20 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

preservation than some of the railroad depots in the 
State to-day. Arizona has the finest collection of pre- 
historic ruins in the country, not excepting the Repub- 
lican National Committee, but it is only in the last few 
years that men have learned how to live in it success- 
fully and to refrain from the six-shooter. Tombstone 
is one of the oldest towns in the State and its name ex- 
plains the slow growth of Arizona as a Territory. In 
Southern Arizona the thermometers are fitted with 
safety valves, and for many years the inhabitants ven- 
tilated each other with revolver bullets in an unsuccess- 
ful effort to keep comfortable. 

Arizona is now growing rapidly and contains 210,- 
000 people — two for each square mile. The State is 
thus not yet congested with citizens, and in some of the 
northern precincts across from the Grand Canyon, 
election returns have to be sent in to the county seat 
by aeroplane. Arizonians are of two classes — those 
who can't go away because they can't live anywhere else, 
and those who don't go away because they won't live 
anywhere else. The soil of the State is a pulverized 
sandstone and will grow canyons, mirages and sage 
brush successfully. When irrigated, it produces enor- 
mous crops, however, and some vast reclamation proj- 
ects are being completed, including the Roosevelt Dam, 
which is the largest of its kind west of Wall Street. 

Arizona is afflicted with a five-cent-a-mile railroad 
fare, which interferes considerably with the cause of 
the poor young candidate, and makes automobiles an 
economy instead of a luxury. It is weird to look at, 
but healthy to breathe and is filled with people who are 
proud of it — now that the bad men and worse Indians 
have proven fatal to each other. 



STATES 21 



OHIO 

THE HOME OF OUR RELATIVES 

OHIO, with its scenic railway name, its huge and 
happy population, and its peculiar genius for 
getting what it wants politically is one of the 
most famous of the States. It is a medium sized com- 
monwealth of 40,000 square miles, is about 100 years 
old and contains 4,500,000 resident members, with non- 
resident or alumni associations in every State of the 
Union. 

Ohio is eastern enough to be conservative, and west- 
ern enough to be breezy. It is the spot, in fact, on 
which the East and the West shake hands. Most Ohio 
families came from New York and New England, 
while most western families lived in Ohio at one time. 
Therefore, when an Ohio man runs for a national of- 
fice, it is strictly a family affair throughout the United 
States, and he is almost impossible to beat. 

Ohio people cultivate the soil with great energy, en- 
couraging it to produce grain, grapes, grindstones, 
pottery and oil derricks in vast quantities. The iron 
ore from Minnesota, and the coal from Pennsylvania 
also collide in Ohio, producing steel mills, which cover 
a quarter section of land apiece, and are making 
metropoli of towns, whose citizens only a few years 
ago had to stop the local passenger trains with red 
lanterns when they wanted to travel. Besides steel 
products, Ohio also manufactures cash registers, 
automobile tires, rubber boots, college graduates, and 



22 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

presidents. Six American presidents have been Ohio 
made. They have all been Republican, but the State is 
now experimenting with a Democratic model, which it 
hopes to introduce at an early date. Ohio also has 
more colleges of the fresh-water or non-intoxicating va- 
riety than any other State. It is possible to travel 
from Ashtabula to Cincinnati without getting out of 
hearing of a college yell or a Mackinac coat. 

The metropolis of Ohio is Cleveland, to the intense 
disgust of Cincinnati, which was once the largest city 
west of Philadelphia. Other great Ohio towns are To- 
ledo, Columbus and Dayton, each of which is larger 
than the metropolis of Texas, Iowa, Kansas, or twenty 
other States. 

Ohio is full of brave and busy men who toil earnestly 
364 days in the year and vote on the 365th day with 
such ardor and persistence that much trouble and em- 
barrassment sometimes result. It is the fourth State 
in the Union in importance, but shivers in its sleep 
when it thinks of Texas, which is surging up behind 
like a herd of stampeding steers. 



STATES 23 



ILLINOIS 

THE PRODUCER OF CHICAGO 

ILLINOIS is a way station on the westward course 
of empire, the last stop before the Mississippi 
River, and in the last 100 years has succeeded in 
permanently detaining a population of 5,700,000 peo- 
ple, almost all of whom can point to some other part 
of the nation and say, fondly, " Grandfather came 
fromx there." 

Illinois is printed in various colors on the map, but 
as a matter of fact, is a deep black State, with a ten- 
foot soil, which can raise 20-foot cornstalks, and can 
put an industrious fanner into the automobile class 
in three crops. Two generations ago, the State gave 
Lincoln, Grant, Logan and Douglas to the nation, but 
the statesman vein has been pinching out ever since. 

Illinois is the third State in the Union in population, 
wealth and manufactures ; the first in railroads and ag- 
ricultural products ; the second in coal ; the third in 
petroleum; the second in college attendance, and the 
first in production of beefsteaks and bacon. It is a 
long State, with a waist-line like that of our youngest 
ex-President, and a backbone composed of the Illinois 
Central Railroad. It reaches from the lower edge of 
the frozen North to the upper edge of the Sunny 
South, and Spring begins at Cairo before ice-cutting 
is over at Galena. This makes Illinois people vary 
greatly in temperament, customs, habits, politics, and 
thousands of northern Illinoisans who can find their 



24 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

way around Paris alone, would take a guide if they 
ventured below the middle of their own State. 

Northern and central Illinois are full of farmer aris- 
tocrats who raise leviathan hogs, and get a new model 
piano player every year. The southern part of the 
State has a strawberry blonde soil, and does not pro- 
duce such luxuriant bank accounts. However, oil and 
coal in vast quantities have been discovered in this re- 
gion of late, and many a farmer who has spent a dis- 
appointed life trying to fatten a red pig on his frugal 
farm, is now ordering $25 worth of bacon and eggs 
each morning in some New York hotel. 

Illinois is composed of two almost equal parts — 
Chicago and the rest of the State. Down State Illi- 
nois is speckled with pleasant little cities and large red 
barns, while Chicago attends almost exclusively to the 
task of swelling the State's population. The finest 
scenery in the State is at " Starved Rock " — a great 
eminence on the Illinois River, named in honor of the 
last people who starved in Illinois — over 200 years 
ago. 



STATES 25 



CALIFORNIA 

THE tourist's PARADISE 

CALIFORNIA is a large, elbow-shaped State,, 
which abuts on the Pacific Ocean for 1,000 miles, 
and is the western terminus of the sleeping-car 
business in this country. It extends from Mexico to 
Oregon laterally, from late winter to early summer 
climatically, and from affluence to railroad lunch 
counters, viewed strictly from the tourist's stand- 
point. 

California is shut off from the rest of the nation by 
mountains, deserts, the Grand Canyon, and a railroad 
fare varying from $60 to $100. In spite of this fact 
Californians speak perfectly good United States, pro- 
duce splendid ball players and insurge with all the skill 
and enthusiasm of Kansans. 

California was discovered almost 400 years ago, but 
was not advertised much until 1849, when its soil was 
found to be strongly impregnated with gold. This 
caused a mad rush of settlers, and the State became 
immediately popular. Some years afterward the Cali- 
fornians experimented with oranges and found that 
the air was also strongly impregnated with gold. This 
caused a second rush. Later on the climate was an- 
alyzed by skillful press agents and was found to be 
warm in winter. This caused a rush of tourists who 
were more strongly impregnated with gold than either 
the soil or the air. In consequence California now has 
almost 2,500,000 people, and there are hardly enough 



26 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

pedestrians among them to keep the automobile own- 
ers amused. 

Cahfornia was a wild State in the fifties, and many 
of its citizens died from inhaling revolver bullets. But 
it has tamed down a great deal and is now a favorite 
place of residence for aged and prosperous Americans 
who have become tired of shoveling the climate of Mas- 
sachusetts or Illinois off their sidewalks. California 
has thousands of citizens who never saw a snowstorm 
until the election of Governor Johnson, and it is possi- 
ble to sit on the sun porch of a southern California res- 
idence in the middle of January and write souvenir 
cards to the dear ones at home in the drifts, without 
thawing out one's fountain pen for days at a time. 
California's climate has produced many poets and art- 
ists and a large number of liars, who forget to talk 
about the Arctic evenings when they chant its perfec- 
tions, 

California produces oranges, lemons, prunes, ostrich 
feathers, redwood lumber, virgin gold, four-foot oys- 
ters, millionaire hotel keepers and many other valuable 
articles in great quantities. The Southern Pacific rail- 
road held the State in slavery until recently, but it is 
now a free commonwealth, and its men and women go 
to vote against assorted tyrants, arm in arm. Just 
at present California's chief occupations are to guard 
the United States against the yellow peril, by making 
Japan mad, and to complete its world's fair, which will 
be unveiled in San Francisco in 1915. 



STATES 27 



PENNSYLVANIA 

HEADQUARTERS FOR HEAT 

PENNSYLVANIA is a stern and rugged State, all 
broken out with mountains, which are full of 
coal, oil, gas and iron. Its effort to get all of 
these substances out of its system has made Pennsyl- 
vania the busiest State in the Union. Most States 
quit work at supper time, but Pennsylvania keeps right 
on all night, smelting its iron with its gas, and making 
coke of its coal and producing thereby such a lurid in- 
ferno of flame that when a Western Pennsylvanian dies 
and goes to hell, as some of them do, his first act is to 
hunt for a push button to turn on some light and heat. 

Pennsylvania is a 45,000 square mile rectangle, 
slightly dog-eared at the eastern end. It extends from 
Lake Erie to the Delaware River, and is traversed by 
the Susquehanna, the Allegheny, the Youghiogheny 
and the Monongahela Rivers, most of which are nav- 
igable, as far as the third syllable. It has nearly 8,- 
000,000 people, and yet there are places in Pennsyl- 
vania where a man could get lost and wander for days 
and days without having to dodge a single automobile. 

The chief features of Pennsylvania are Philadelphia, 
which has amassed 1,400,000 people and a city hall 537 
feet high in 200 years ; Pittsburg, which is a brunette 
town, containing the largest millionaire factory in the 
world ; the oil fields, which have covered a large area 
with a thick beard of derricks, and the State Capitol, a 
handsome $4,000,000 building which contains the finest 



28 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

collection of cast iron bronze in the world. The promi- 
nent citizens are Boies Penrose, who has done the vot- 
ing for Pennsylvania for a great many years ; George 
r. Baer, personal representative of Providence in the 
coal fields, and Edward Bok, inventor of 700,000 ways 
of making the home happier, among which Votes for 
Women is not included. 

Pennsylvania was discovered and started forward 
by William Penn, the Quaker, and has had a glorious 
and peaceful history. It produced the Declaration of 
Independence and afterward entertained the British 
army in Philadelphia for a year, sending it forth at 
last too fat to fight. It was invaded by the Confeder- 
ates in 1863 and the Progressives captured it in 1912. 

Pennsylvania contains many splendid and refined 
people, and English is spoken fluently in many parts of 
the State. It lights and heats the nation, provides it 
with railroads, light reading, correspondence courses, 
and Progressive electoral votes, and is a thoroughly 
useful commonwealth. It is growing rapidly and will 
soon be as large as the Pennsylvania railroad. 



STATES 29 



INDIANA 

PROVIDER OF VICE-PRESIDENTS 

INDIANA is generally located just west of the 
Presidency and also southeast of Chicago and 
twenty-four hours by mail from the prominent 
publishing-houses of the United States. It has 
2,700,000 people who are so equally divided politically 
that the birth of twins in a Republican family has an 
effect on the betting odds twenty-one years later. In- 
diana has vibrated between Republicanism and Democ- 
racy with great intelligence and foresight, having onl}^ 
guessed wrong, nationally, once in its history. Its 
chief products are Vice-Presidents and best sellers. 

Indiana abuts on Lake Michigan and is rapidly cov- 
ering its sand dunes in the north with factories which 
have escaped from Chicago, to the immense disgust of 
the latter. South of this is the natural gas belt, which 
was first discovered because of the immense output of 
statesmen in this vicinity. A stratum of authors lies 
south of the natural gas belt, while a thick deposit of 
colleges covers the western border of the State. South 
of the author belt is ancient Indiana, which was settled 
first, but is now given over largely to the production 
of quaint characters for fiction, being unexcelled for 
this purpose. 

Indiana people are intensely loyal to their State, 
and are bound together by common ties, chiefly inter- 
urban ties. It is possible to catch a 9 A, m. car to In- 
dianapolis from almost any Indiana town and to return 



30 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

before evening, and almost everybody does it. Indi- 
ana people have supported each other for office so 
vigorously that the State's production of public men 
is second only to Oliio, and it has supported its authors 
so courageously that the Congressional Library at 
Washington has been compelled to rent a large barn as 
an annex to its Indiana department. Riley, Ade, 
Tarkington, McCutcheon, Eggleston, Wallace, Nichol- 
son, Major, Thompson, Mrs. Porter and Kin Hubbard 
are the products of which Indiana is the fondest, and 
the State firmly believes that if Shakespeare had lived 
near an Indiana college he might have been a great 
author, too. 

Indiana people helped free the colonies and the ne- 
groes with exceptional bravery and are now discussing 
the personal liberty question with everything from 
brickbats to injunctions. The State is not growing 
very fast, but when its various annexes to Chicago and 
Pittsburg are completed and in full blast, it will boom 
once more and will cover the swamps of the northeast 
section with colleges and Carnegie libraries. 



STATES 31 



MISSOURI 

THE OLD-FASHIONED STATE 

MISSOURI, the patriarch of States west of the 
Mississippi, is a big State with real bound- 
ary lines. When you get out of it you can 
notice the difference without looking at the map. It 
has temperament, history, pride and a sense of humor. 
Missouri people get more fun out of talking about 
Missouri than they do by going to comic opera. Mis- 
souri is one of our national pleasantries, and helps 
make life happier in this commercial and busy nation. 
Missouri is a plain, downright, old-fashioned State 
and proud of it. It has 3,300,000 people, divided into 
two classes — those who call the State " Mizzoury " 
and love it and those who call it " Missoura " and wish 
it had more society and less mules. It is the seventh 
State in population, the third in corn, ninth in rail- 
roads, sixth in number of school children, first in mules 
and last in credulity. Owing to the passion which Mis- 
sourians have for " being shown " and for showing 
each other up, politics in the State has been an earnest 
and wakeful operation for the last seventy years. 

Missouri is modern at the eastern end in St. Louis, 
and at its western end in Kansas City. It is also being 
modernized in the legislature at Jefferson City, the 
capital. It is historic along the Mississippi, with a 
French accent, unreconstructed in Clay County, and 
primitive in the Ozarks, where the locomotive is less fa- 
miliar to the children than the Mastodon. It is 



32 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

divided into two varying parts by the restless Missouri 
River, and by the local option fight. It has produced 
Mark Twain, the James boys, Joseph Folk, Adolphus 
Busch, the science of osteopathy and the road drag. 
Missouri is so backward that ante-bellum picnics are 
still held in some parts and is so advanced that when 
an octopus reaches a tentacle across the State line, 
said tentacle is cut off and hung up in the Statehouse as 
a trophy. 

Missouri was settled 150 years ago, but has re- 
mained unsettled ever since. It fought itself vigor- 
ously in the Civil War, and has been revolving polit- 
ically of late with extreme rapidity. It was once the 
fifth State in population in the Union, but has been 
passed by Massachusetts and Texas, owing to the vast 
number of Missourians who have strayed across the 
State line at Kansas City and St. Louis and have set- 
tled on suburban but alien soil. However, one Mis- 
souri man can create as much interest and excitement 
as two ordinary men and the State will never be unim- 
portant. / 



STATES 33 



MASSACHUSETTS 

THE LARGEST STATE FOR ITS SIZE 

MASSACHUSETTS is the Roosevelt of the 
States. It is the best advertised of all our 
commonwealths and is continually in the spot- 
light for one reason or another. It contained the Pil- 
grim Fathers, the Salem witches and Brook farm. It 
started the Revolution and the abolition movement and 
seethed with great men for two centuries, though just 
at present its tombstones are more illustrious than its 
representatives in " Who's Who." 

Massachusetts also contains Harvard University, 
the Hoosac tunnel, the Bunker Hill Monument, Thos. 
W. Lawson and Boston, with the accent — and be care- 
ful about it, please — on the latter. It is, in fact, the 
biggest little State in the Union. In the beginning it 
chose a name five sizes too large for it, but has man- 
aged to live up to it and then some. It only contains 
8,000 square miles, or slightly more than a Texas cat- 
tle ranch. But 3,300,000 people live on this patch of 
ground and there are few localities in the State lonely 
enough for a man to practice on the cornet without 
being a public nuisance. 

Massachusetts was settled in 1620 by the Pilgrim 
Fathers. The Fathers were not proud, but their de- 
scendants have made up for this. The State devoted 
its first 100 years to grubbing the rocks, trees and In- 
dians from the soil, its next century to producing patri- 
ots and statesmen and the succeeding fifty years to 



34 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

producing poets and philosophers. Since then, Massa- 
chusetts has contented itself with producing cot- 
ton, woolen, and shoe mills. These are managed by 
foreigners who now live in the State in such vast quan- 
tities that cities like Lowell and Lynn and Fall River 
have American Consuls and New England clubs. 

Massachusetts abounds in factories, good roads, trol- 
ley cars, historical societies. Congregational churches 
and superfluous " r's." The New Englander carries 
a pepper pot full of extra " r's " and sprinkles his con- 
versation with them with great industry. He is also 
inveterately hostile to the final " g." Massachusetts 
has always wanted its dialect adopted as the oflScial 
language of the United States, but this cannot be be- 
cause it takes a man four generations to learn it. 

Massachusetts has many large cities, which are con- 
tinually spoiling beautiful farming country by sprawl- 
ing out over it. Boston is the metropolis of the State. 
It is a large, irregular congestion at the eastern end 
with a fine reputation for learning and an exciting 
history, having been captured by the British in 1774, 
by the Americans in 1775 and by the Irish a few years 
ago. 

Massachusetts produces Presidents, pugilists and 
champion baseball teams with equal facility. It is 
proud of itself and doesn't care who knows it. Others 
may praise Massachusetts, but it is a waste of time, 
because Massachusetts is too busy praising itself to 
hear them. 



STATES 35 



THE STATE OF MAINE 

THE RIGHT BOWER 

THE State of Maine is an irregular knob on the 
northeast corner of the map of the United 
States. It is surrounded by Canada on the 
north and east, the Atlantic Ocean on the south and 
the Boston & Maine railroad on the west, so escape is 
almost impossible. 

Maine is a rough, rugged country full of rough, rug- 
ged names such as " Androscoggin," " Aroostock," 
" Damariscotta," and " Molechunkemunk." It has 
been settled for about 250 years, but in spite of this, 
very few Maine farms have been entirely un-bowldered 
as yet. The first crop off of the Maine farm is a stone 
house, and the next few crops are stone bams, stone 
fences, stone well curbs, stone sheep houses, and stone 
walks. The stone boat is a familiar and useful craft 
throughout the State and has hauled enough rocks off 
of Maine farms in the last century to hide the pyra- 
mids under billions of tons of glacial drift. 

The climate of Maine is dry by a very small major- 
ity and is automatically refrigerated throughout the 
greater part of the year. It gets through snowing in 
Maine in the spring, just in time to cloud up and pre- 
pare for the first fall flurry. The population of the 
State is about 750,000 people, most of whom are hud- 
dled together in the extreme southern section for 
j warmth's sake. Owing to the climate, it is hard to 
! raise much of anything in Maine except hotel prices. 



36 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

The seacoast of Maine resembles a piece of Battenberg 
lace and is profusely speckled with summer hotels. In 
the spring the Maine hotel-keeper takes a room, which 
would rent for $1.25 a month during the winter, and 
by judiciously mixing it with climate, manages to raise 
the price to $7.00 a day by July. 

Besides hotel prices, Maine raises hay, potatoes, pine 
trees, and statesmen. The entire north end of the 
State is a shaggy growth of timber. This section, 
however, is being rapidly barbered by the lumber in- 
terests. Maine statesmen are of the finest brand and 
when a Maine man goes to Congress he usually remains 
there until death doth him part. The climate of his 
home State undoubtedly accounts for the tenacity with 
which the Maine statesman clings to Washington. 

For many years Maine was one of the vested inter- 
ests of the Republican Party, but it recently went 
Democratic with some emphasis and nowadays when the 
old-fashioned Maine farmer gets out in the morning, he 
looks over to the West to see if the sun has changed its 
habits too. 



STATES 37 



FLORIDA 

THE SOUTHEAST BOWER 

FLORIDA is a vast expanse of water, sand and cli- 
mate, which sticks out about 400 miles into the 
ocean at the southeast comer of the nation, and is 
as hard to dodge as a sore thumb. For many years it 
was the vermiform appendix of the United States. No 
particular use for it was known, and the Seminole In- 
dians kept it in a constant state of inflammation. It 
is now being extensively cultivated, however, and is 
growing faster than any other Southern State, though 
goodness knows it needs to, having only 750,000 souls 
and a few thousand hotel-keepers. 

Florida was discovered by Ponce de Leon almost 400 
years ago and immediately became famous for its won- 
derful climate. Ever since then people have been going 
to Florida to enjoy the climate and coming back to en- 
joy society. This shows Florida's simplicity. In 
California the man who arrives to enjoy the climate is 
treated so hospitably that he never saves money enough 
to come back. 

However, in the past few years a few great hotels 
have been built in Florida, and it is now possible to go 
down there swelled all out of shape with money and be 
.success fully treated for the affliction in a very few 
weeks. 

Florida is divided equally into timber, swamps and 
orange groves. It contains the Everglades, the great- 
est swamp in America. It is so large that the Agri- 



38 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

cultural department almost got mired in it recently. 
It also contains the only sea-going railroad in the 
world, running to Key West over 100 miles of water and 
keys. The Florida key is a peculiar one made out of 
coral, and is almost as big as an old-fashioned New 
England house key. 

Florida ships oranges, grapefruit, alligators and ci- 
gars to the world. If it were not for Florida, mankind 
would be able to swear off smoking. In fact, this 
would be almost necessary. Florida also contains the 
oldest city in the United States — St. Augustine — 
which is one of the celebrated sleeping beauties. The 
metropolis of the State is Jacksonville, which has grown 
out of general stores into skyscrapers in the last ten 
years. The capital is Tallahassee, of which no more is 
known, 

Florida is now very prosperous. Buying Florida 
land is a national diversion and selling Florida land is 
one of the surest roads to wealth. 



CITIES 

American cities are the most colossal in- 
fants on the globe. Few of them are old 
enough to stop growing and none old enough 
to keep their faces clean. 

American cities are alike in their ambition 
— which is to gain 100 per cent, in popula- 
tion by the next census ; in their pride which is 
in their big new skyscraper ; in their billboards 
which advertise the same plays, cigarettes and 
breakfast foods; in their emotions which oc- 
cur from 3 to 5 p. m. during the baseball 
season; and in their government in which 
grave scandal has recently been disclosed. 
They lead the world in their progress, amaze 
it with their energy, inspire it with their 
ideals and shock it with their looks. 

Anything which can be said about Ameri- 
can cities to-day is out of date to-morrow 
and this refers particularly to government 
and appearance. 



CITIES 41 



NEW ORLEANS 

NEW ORLEANS is a foreign city which was left 
behind when the French and Spanish evacuated 
America and which remained in a petrified and 
most attractive state until the wave of modern prog- 
ress rolled over it a few years ago. 

New Orleans is the metropolis of the South and has 
been owned by five nations since it was founded some- 
thing over 200 years ago. The French and Spanish 
fought for it, the English captured it, the Americans 
bought it and the Confederate States gave it up to the 
United States fifty years ago. Of late the city has 
been absorbing Americanism rapidly, having adopted 
skyscrapers, ward politics, baseball and department 
stores with great enthusiasm. 

New Orleans lies on the broad flat Louisiana low- 
lands, a few feet below the Mississippi River, which 
flows past its front door and has to be kept out of the 
city by means of levees which are so tall that no one 
who is not a good climber can fall into the river. Its 
low situation has complicated life in New Orleans and 
has caused the elevated cisterns and tombs for which 
the city is famous. It is possible to tell the wealth of 
a New Orleans citizen by the number of cisterns he has 
piled one above the other in his back yard, and a man 
with a four-story cistern is regarded with awe. New 
Orleans citizens are not extravagant while living, but 
are rather ostentatious when dead. A New Orleans 
man wiU live contentedly for seventy years in an un- 



42 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

painted frame dwelling in order to save up money for a 
magnificent two-story tomb in Metaire Cemetery. 

New Orleans is the center of Southern wealth, fash- 
ion, industry and commerce, and has its own individual 
steamship lines to Europe and South America. It is a 
substantially built city whose old streets are a forest 
of green iron work porches, and whose street cars will 
not only take a man out to the suburbs, but will retrieve 
him for the same nickel. It is divided into To-day and 
Yesterday by Canal Street, which is so wide that four 
car tracks and an automobile race on either side are 
accommodated. On one side of Canal Street English 
is spoken fluently, while on the other side the inhabit- 
ants still talk with their shoulders and eyebrows, and 
the scattered remnants of an eighteenth century French 
aristocracy still maintain a French opera house and a 
little cemetery so exclusive that the only way to get into 
it is to edge in beside the bones of a great-great-grand- 
parent. 

The climate of New Orleans is fine in March. The 
city has 350,000 people and is waiting for the Panama 
Canal with the eagerness of a place which is tired of 
history and tourists and wants to dabble in corner lots 
and building records for a change. 



CITIES 43 



PITTSBURG 

PITTSBURG is a coal-black metropolis, with 
flame trimmings, and inhabited by joy-riders on 
the steel tariff. 
Over 500,000 people live in Pittsburg and several 
hundred millionaires, scattered around the world, live 
on it. Pittsburg makes most of the steel for the uni- 
verse and has steel mills instead of cabbage patches for 
suburbs. Ten shiploads of iron ore are mixed with ten 
trainloads of coal every day and the result is a ring of 
permanent volcanoes around the city. When these are 
in full blast they form a Great Red Way, of which 
Pittsburg is much prouder than New York is of her 
Gay White Way. As a matter of fact Pittsburg's Red 
Way is largely responsible for New York's White Way. 
A millionaire fully equipped is turned out of her steel 
mills every time the sun sets and a Pittsburg millionaire 
gets into trouble in New York every time the sun rises. 
Pittsburg is located in the western part of Pennsyl- 
vania, where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers 
join and boil their combined names down into the Ohio. 
Originally Pittsburg had an annex called Allegheny 
City, which was a desert of front doors, without a post- 
office, railroad station or theater. But it followed the 
example of its steel trust and benevolently assimilated 
its rival, thus becoming the eighth city in size in the 
country. It climbs the steep hills from the river banks 
in all directions and has made their summits bristle with 
twenty-story buildings. It is well built but poorly ven- 



44 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

tilated, and on damp, cloudy days looks like the inside 
of a cistern with the lid on. 

Pittsburg people have two recreations — winning 
baseball pennants and founding banks. It has more 
banks than any city in the world. A Pittsburg man who 
isn't a bank director is as lonely as a Boston man whose 
great-great-great-grandfather isn't buried in the old 
Granery cemetery. There are 100 banks in Pittsburg, 
and they have driven the drug stores and saloons off of 
all the good corners in the town. 

Andrew Carnegie and Hans Wagner are Pittsburg's 
two greatest citizens, and are very kind to their home 
town. Carnegie is always building a technical school 
or a library or a music hall, and Wagner is continually 
publishing a home run just in time to wallop the Chi- 
cago team. 

Pittsburg is one of the few walled towns in America. 
It is strongly garrisoned by the Pennsylvania railroad, 
which has repelled with great slaughter all attempts by 
rival railroads to enter the city. 



CITIES 45 



CHICAGO 

CHICAGO is one of the greatest feats ever per- 
formed by the human race. It is only seventy- 
five years old, and yet it is the fifth city in the 
world in size, and leads the world in lung development. 
In 1837, Chicago consisted of a drug store, a main 
street, and ninety-nine signs, advertising malaria reme- 
dies. To-day it has 2,250,000 inhabitants, and the 
city of seventy-five years ago could be successfully lost 
in the largest of its six union depots. 

Chicago was founded in the swamp on the shores of 
Lake Michigan by a lot of thirty-third degree hustlers. 
There was no excuse for the city, but this didn't bother 
its founders. First they manufactured the Chicago 
River out of a muddy little creek. Then they built 
railroads, and encouraged people to build towns along 
the railroads, and thus provide a reason for their ex- 
istence. Later on, to save time lost by chills and fever, 
they boosted the entire city fifteen feet into the air, 
the greatest feat of second-story work in history. 
Then they turned the Chicago River around and made 
it run backward in order to get rid of their sewerage. 
Finally, because the Illinois Central Railroad would 
not get off the lake shore, they moved the lake shore 
away from it. They are now busy revising the climate, 
and if they ever have any trouble with their electric 
light companies, they will probably put a new sun on 
the night shift. The only way to get ahead of a Chi- 
cagoan is to get busy and finish up before he is born. 



46 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

Chicago was burned in 1871, with a loss of $200,- 
000,000, but business was only slightly interfered with 
for a few days. The city captured the packing busi- 
ness of the country by loading hogs in an endless rail- 
way and butchering them at a speed of thirty miles an 
hour. It invented the skyscraper in order to save the 
trouble of building thick stone walls, and it spent $50,- 
000,000 in advertising by building a World's Fair 
twenty years ago. It has put 1,000 miles of its rail- 
ways on stilts to save wear and tear on its citizens, and 
in the late eighties, when business was dull, it went out 
and annexed twenty-five towns, four townships, two 
rivers, three lakes, a sleeping car trust, four primeval 
forests and a cattle ranch. It is now putting its coal 
wagons and drays underground, is pushing the lake 
back an additional half mile, and is making grand opera 
pay dividends. 

Chicago has thirty-three railroads and every one of 
them ends in the city. Five hundred passenger trains 
a day enter the city, and in each one of them the por- 
ter announces, " Chicago ; all out." Most of these 
passengers give up trying to find the station to which 
which they must transfer, and become permanent resi- 
dents. Chicago has a $30,000,000 University, an hon- 
estly built city hall, a store so large that it furnishes 
guides for its customers, and a baseball team that has 
won eleven pennants. The city is dirty, but no dirtier 
than any infant. It is very healthy, except to cattle 
and hogs. The favorite diversions of Chicago men are 
looping the loop, taking political conventions away 
from New York, showing visitors through the stock 
yards, and leaving a million to some Chicago institu- 
tion. 



CITIES 47 



LOS ANGELES 

LOS ANGELES began business quite modestly a 
generation ago with a few houses and a full 
stock of fancy climate, which it has since been re- 
tailing to tourists and retired business men at the high- 
est market prices. The city owes its great success to 
the fact that it has over 100,000 traveling representa- 
tives constantly advertising its wares. During the 
winter most of the citizens of the mid-west, who have 
made money enough to flee from the furnace room and 
coal bill, journey to Los Angeles and spend the winter 
sitting under orange trees and writing letters back to 
the shivering East. In the spring, they go back home 
and talk climate. In this way they have worked up so 
much business for Los Angeles that the city has grown 
from 100,000 to 325,000 people in ten years ; and they 
pay Los Angeles for doing it. The highest type of ad- 
vertising is always the kind for which the advertiser 
gets paid himself. 

Los Angeles is situated in a desert which can be read- 
ily transformed into fruit orchards and Italian gar- 
dens, by means of a hose and a pump. It is composed 
in equal parts of people who are spending money and 
of people who are helping them spend it. This helps 
business immensely and keeps everyone so happy that 
the only way to make a Los Angel stop talking about 
his city is to shift the subject to fleas. 

The Los Angeles climate is so salubrious that inva- 
lids who go out there with fractional lungs come back 



48 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

home and out-talk strong men on the subject of Cali- 
fornia. It is a dry, sunny climate conducive to the 
raising of lemons, oranges, prunes, hotel prices and 
dust. One can go without an overcoat all day through- 
out the winter in Los Angeles and sometimes during 
summer evenings. This climate has benefited everyone 
who has tried it with the exception of the McNamara 
brothers, and if the city were not at the far end of a 
$75 railroad fare it would now have several million in- 
habitants. 

Los Angeles is full of hustle, happiness and big ideas. 
It has the largest interurban system in the world and 
builds skyscrapers more industriously than any other 
city, except Chicago and New York. It is piping its 
drinking water several hundred miles and has recently 
annexed an ocean harbor, a mountain and a small des- 
ert. It can be reached by taking a train de luxe, fitted 
with Turkish baths, libraries, music rooms, gymnasi- 
ums, conservatories and rathskellers, and getting off 
when the smell of oranges gets thick enough to eat. 

Los Angeles has more beautiful homes than any other 
city of its size, and welcomes all the world to come out 
and squat on the shining sands in the outskirts. Resi- 
dents are admitted to citizenship as soon as they can 
say " Lohs Anghlais " fluently, and everyone over 
twenty-one years of age, skirted or panted, is allowed 
one vote at each election. And Los Angeles elections 
are more interesting than New Haven football games. 



CITIES 49 



NEW YORK CITY 

NEW YORK CITY is the biggest city in the world, 
not because it has the most people but because it 
does the biggest things. 

New York has only a paltry 5,000,000 people in- 
cluding millionaires not taxed while London has 8,000,- 
000 who live near enough to it to be annoyed by motor 
omnibuses. But New York makes London look like a 
collection of Dutch ovens. New York contains the 
tallest buildings in the world, the greatest bridges in 
the world, the largest railroad station in the world, the 
greatest commerce, the most terrific hotels, the loudest 
subways, the most prominent baseball team, the great- 
est financiers and the most princely grafters on this 
planet or any other so far as known. 

New York, in fact, is so big that many a small man 
has swelled up until he burst while trying to fit it. 
New York was founded on Manhattan Island almost 
300 years ago but has now spread out over the country 
like a heavy rash until flat buildings are being built as 
far north as Yonkers and as far up as the third Satel- 
lite of Jupiter. The city takes the raw immigrants 
from Europe and works them up into census statistics 
and garment workers at the rate of 200,000 a year. 
It also takes young geniuses of all kinds from the West 
and dooms them to a life of poverty at $15,000 a year 
on the nineteenth floor of an apartment house. It 
leads the nation in finance, commerce, manufactures, 
skyscrapers, reactionaries, drama, dress suits, hotel 



50 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

prices, automobiles and press agents. One reason why 
New York has become so famous is bhe fact that her 
writers would rather advertise her free of charge than* 
get $1,000 a week for exploring Chicago and other sec- 
tions of the wild interior. 

New York is famous for its $15,000,000 private resi- 
dences and also for its skill in stuffing 5,000 people into 
a single block on the East Side. It has produced Theo- 
dore Roosevelt, J. P. Morgan and George M. Cohan, 
but only worships the last two. It is the richest city 
in the world and doesn't give a whoop who knows it. 
It is connected with the rest of the nation by six tun- 
nels and a few congressmen and with Europe by twenty 
steamship lines and 150 fathers-in-law of titles. 

The most celebrated sights in New York are Wall 
Street, Broadway, the fifty-story office buildings, Cen- 
tral Park, the East River Bridges, the Statue of Lib- 
erty, the Pennsylvania Station, China-town, the Hun- 
garian restaurants, the Jewish quarter, little Italy, the 
Irish consulate at the city hall, the Viennese operas, the 
English clothes on Fifth Avenue, the old Dutch aris- 
tocracy, the African prizefighters, the Turkish batns 
and an American alderman on Long Island. 

One could easily spend a month seeing sights in New 
York but owing to the far greater ease with which one 
can spend everything else he has most people come home 
at the end of a week in the day coach. 



CITIES 51 



SEATTLE 

SEATTLE is a contagion which is spreading rap- 
idly over the shores of Puget Sound and has so 
far permanently affected 237,000 people. It 
covers 110 square miles and is called a city by its in- 
habitants and a forest reservation by Tacoma and other 
jealous rivals. 

Seattle stands on the salt shores of Puget Sound at 
an average angle of forty degrees, it being necessary 
in spots for the intrepid Seattler to use an Alpine stock 
while chasing the mountain goats off of his mansard 
garden. A man named Thompson has been changing 
all this by washing the hills out from under the busi- 
ness section and then lowering the buildings to earth by 
means of parachutes. Because of this, Seattle is the 
only city in the world which has a skyline that is going 
down and the old resident who comes back after a few 
years' absence has to take a balloon to find the spots 
where he played in his childhood. Thanks to Mr. 
Thompson, a good many Seattle cellars are now twenty 
stories above the street, but the business thoroughfares 
are now fairly level and the citizen who slips on a ba- 
nana peel while going to his bank does not have to take 
an elevator back to pick up his hat. 

Seattle was founded in 1852, but owing to the damp 
climate and the scarcity of settlers equipped with both 
lungs and gills, it grew very slowly and only acquired 
a population of 150 in the first ten years. Up to 
twenty years ago, it was a vast wooden town which was 



52 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

extended by the simple process of cutting down a pine 
tree and building a house out of it. Then the Klon- 
dike was discovered and every prospector who went 
north spent what he had in Seattle on leaving and what 
he had found on returning. Seattle then grew to 80,- 
000 people with huge awkward jumps and has soared 
into the big city class during the last ten years with a 
rapidity which makes Chicago's early growth seem 
timid and conservative. 

Seattle is a modern municipality with all the latest 
improvements in government, including a mayor with a 
return string firmly attached to him and women 
equipped with the divine right of suffrage and a fine 
taste in clothes. The city has been built in great haste 
and still has skyscraper office buildings and skyscraper 
forest trees in adjoining wards, as well as Totem poles 
on its main street, and a $5,000,000 university farther 
out. It has a magnificent harbor in front, from which 
Hong Kong and Yokohama can be reached without 
change, and a splendid back drop called Mt. Ranier, 
though the man who called it this in Tacoma would be 
prejudicing his accident insurance. The city is grow- 
ing so fast that even the most skillful San Franciscan 
finds it hard to get haughty within its limits, and it will 
have 400,000 people in 1920 unless the census is con- 
ducted by rank reactionaries. 



CITIES 53 



WASHINGTON, D. C. 

WASHINGTON, D. C, the metropolis of the 
forty-eight Washingtons in this country, 
and the capital of the United States, is lo- 
cated by the Potomac and between Virginia and Mary- 
land under the thumb of Congress. It was built to or- 
der in 1800, and was laid out by an artist who filled it 
full of diagonal avenues and little squares which are 
now infested with statues. Congress is forever punish- 
ing some statesman by erecting a statue of him in a 
public square and the directory of Washington statues 
is larger than the telephone book. 

Washington has only one object in life w^hich is to 
hold the government of the United States. It began in 
a modest way and was burned out in 1814 by the Brit- 
ish, but has been enlarged from time to time to accom- 
modate the growing hordes of officials until it now has 
350,000 people. Washington contains 600 congress- 
men and senators and thousands of other important of- 
ficials who enrich the city by paying $25.00 a week 
board. Senators are so common in Washington that 
no church social Is a success without half a dozen and 
the congressman who is so big In his home town that 
they name children after him has to give a cigar to a 
Washington reporter to get his name in the paper. 

Washington is called the city of magnificent dis- 
tances. This is because It Is 1,500 miles from the cen- 
ter of the country and has until recently been 1,000,000 
miles from the people. It has wide shady streets paved 



54 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

with asphalt in the winter and hot tar in the summer 
and is speckled with vast buildings erected by Congress 
for the use of sightseers. It contains the Capitol and 
the White House, Washington's monument, which was 
the first American skyscraper, a forty-acre depot, a 
fifty-acre treasury and many other magnificent build- 
ings which have been located with great care just next to 
prehistoric henhouses or antebellum oyster shops. 
Washington hops gayly from the sublime to the ridicu- 
lous and Pennsylvania Avenue, its greatest street, is 
composed alternately of $4,000,000 buildings and shoe- 
shining parlors. 

Washington is noted for its society which is illu- 
minated with gold braid and foreign dignitaries and for 
the thick fog which covers it continually and prevents 
the officials from seeing what is going on back in the 
home districts. The climate is beautiful during a few 
days in April but varies the rest of the time from sloppy 
to superheated, and many a promising statesman's ca- 
reer has been cut short by getting his shoes full of 
Washington weather in February. Washington's cli- 
mate has been the means of producing hundreds of po- 
litical vacancies and thus encouraging rotation in office. 

Washington has no factories and if the government 
should pack up and move away it would soon wither 
and die. It is, however, growing more beautiful each 
year and already causes the foreign visitor to speak 
kindly of it until he sticks fast in one of its asphalt 
streets during a hot day. 



CITIES 55 



PHILADELPHIA 

PHILADELPHIA is the largest village in the 
world. It is situated in Pennsylvania on the 
Delaware River and consists of 300,000 red brick 
dwelling houses with marble steps which are scrubbed 
every day by Philadelphia women and sat upon every 
summer evening by Philadelphia men. When a family 
gets so large that the steps cannot accomm.odate them, 
the eldest son marries and starts to fill a set of steps of 
his own. 

Philadelphia is noted as a city of homes and regards 
New York with scorn as a city of clifF-dwellers. 

Philadelphia is two stories high except in the center 
where it bulges terrifically for a few blocks. It contains 
the greatest locomotive works in the world, the greatest 
magazine publishing house, the largest park and the 
best baseball team. Philadelphia is supposed to be a 
sleepy town, but if it should ever wake up heaven help 
the rest of the world. It is one of the most versatile 
and energetic somnambulists in existence. 

Philadelphia was founded in 1681 by William Penn, 
and many of the original buildings are still actively in 
business down in the wholesale section. In 1776, Phila- 
delphia entertained the Continental Congress and the 
city still contains Liberty Hall and the Liberty Bell, 
having successfully defended it against many city ad- 
ministrations during the last century. In 1876, Phila- 
delphia pulled off a Centennial exposition with great 
success and in 1912 it kicked out its grafters. Aside 
from these events it has rested quietly. 



56 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

Philadelphia means " City of Brotherly Love " and 
is well named. Everyone loves his brother and his 
grandfather and all his cousins and miscellaneous rela- 
tions, but heaven help the stranger who comes to Phila- 
delphia. Seventy years ago some New York people 
moved to Philadelphia and the natives are just begin- 
ning to ask their grandchildren how they like their new 
home. 

Philadelphia has about 1,500,000 people and is grow- 
ing quietly at the rate of one square mile of houses a 
year. It is noted for its society which is quite simple, 
and still prefers to live in small houses around Ritten- 
house Square^ and to go down town after breakfast after 
the mail. It is as impossible for the outsider to get 
into Philadelphia society as it seems to be for a modern 
Philadelphia statesman to get into history. 

Philadelphia is surrounded by beautiful suburbs 
which can be viewed at the rate of three cents a mile on 
all railroads. It is less than 100 miles from New York 
which laughs at it, and is always alluding in some new 
manner to its sleepiness. However, the Philadelphian 
now retorts that it is never asleep around second base 
and this remark can be guaranteed to produce apoplexy 
in a New York man in five seconds or money refunded. 



CITIES 57 



SAN FRANCISCO 

SAN FRANCISCO is the largest city on the eastern 
coast of the Pacific Ocean. It is also the ague 
headquarters of the country. First it shakes and 
then it burns up. It has burned up three times and 
has now taken the hint and has kicked the grafters out. 

San Francisco is located right side up with care on 
the side of the hills overlooking San Francisco Bay. It 
was founded in 1849 during the gold rush and has had 
an eventful career ever since. Said career came to a 
climax when the city fell down in 1905 and afterwards 
burned up with a loss of $200,000,000. Thoughtless 
people say that there was an earthquake, but San Fran- 
ciscans deny this. Some tourists who have been in the 
city in February declare that the city was only shiver- 
ing during a bit of unusually San Franciscan weather, 
while others who have ridden down Jackson Street on 
a cable car claim that the city was merely sliding down 
hill. Anyway San Francisco is now completely rebuilt 
and is planning to tempt Fate again with a World's 
Fair in 1915. It is entirely fearless. 

San Francisco has 450,000 people and 250,000 more 
live across the bay, where the climate does not go 
through the vest so easily. It is a proud, handsome, 
prosperous, cosmopolitan, vigorous and pungent city 
with ways of its own, and customs which make Eastern- 
ers blink and gasp for breath at first. It produces 
large crops of artists, musicians, and writers, who are 
shipped when they are ripe to New York, and it also 



58 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

produces peculiar brands of politicians who are shipped 
when they are a good deal over-ripe to San Quentin 
penitentiary. They used to say that the " Golden 
Gate," which lets the ocean into San Francisco Bay, 
wasn't real gold, because no politician had ever stolen 
it, but of late San Francisco has tried the new, non- 
adhesive brand of alderman with great success. 

San Francisco is noted for its great bay, its magnifi- 
cent hotels, its trained seals, the great residences of the 
early San Franciscans who became millionaires over 
night and recovered almost as quickly, its fine parks, its 
naughty and carefree restaurants and its Chinese quar- 
ter, which is larger than any west of Hong Kong. San 
Francisco is very proud of its Chinese, but when a Japa- 
nese is observed in the city the reserves are called out 
and the newspapers are fortified with extra large heads. 

San Francisco stretches magnificently over the heights 
above the bay and is proud of its great hills, including 
Telegraph Hill and Nob Hill. But it would trade them 
both for James J. Hill and a little railroad competition. 
Much has been said of San Francisco's climate and the 
recording angel has been overworked on both sides. It 
is a fine climate and very reasonable in temperature, sel- 
dom falling below fifty, but the San Franciscan's pride 
in refusing to steam heat it has sent many visitors home 
with chilblains and unjust remarks. 



CITIES 59 



KANSAS CITY 

KANSAS CITY, the largest and loudest city in the 
Middle West, is located beside and occasionally 
under the Missouri River. The city is in Mis- 
souri, but is so close to the State line that about 100,000 
of its inhabitants have spilled over into Kansas, where 
they are irretrievably lost for census purposes. In spite 
of this Kansas City has 250,000 citizens who do as much 
work and make as much noise doing it as a million New 
Englanders. 

Kansas City was first located beneath the bluffs of 
the Missouri, but climbed these bluffs with great exer- 
tion, many years ago and has now spread over several 
dozen hills in a manner which makes a ride in a Kansas 
City street car resemble a trip in a scenic railway. The 
business section occupies two hills and a valley and the 
quickest way to get down to Main Street is to sit down 
on Ninth and slide or take an elevator on the ground 
floor of a Grand Avenue building and go down three 
stories. Kansas City cellars are made of rock and have 
to be pried out with dynamite whenever a building is in- 
serted in them. Digging cellars is a favorite Kansas 
City excitement and the resident who has not been shot 
in the neck with a jagged piece of real estate is not con- 
sidered naturalized. 

Kansas City started out to become the metropolis of 
the world in 1890, but after building an elevated rail- 
road and 19,000 real estate offices it sustained a punc- 
ture and ran with a flat wheel for many years. It is 



6o SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

now growing at the rate of 80,000 people per decade 
and will eventually pass New Orleans, Milwaukee, Cin- 
cinnati, and Washington. 

Kansas City packs hogs and cattle, sells implements 
and groceries to the great southwest and entertains 
relatives between trains. It has twenty railroads, all 
of whose trains enter a prehistoric union depot by a 
double track which always has a waiting list of passen- 
ger trains on it. For many years the city's local, 
State and national platform has been a new depot and 
the third largest station in the world is now being built 
$1.00 by taxicab from the business section. 

Kansas City has more good-looking $10,000 homes 
than any other American city, owing to the fact that 
when the builder gets his cellar blasted out he has 
enough material to build his house. Kansas City men 
work hard, but will always stop an hour or a day to 
talk about Kansas City in a low, well modulated shriek 
of enthusiasm. The city is full of concentrated hustle, 
but is also amusing itself by building parks, boulevards, 
paseos, cliff drives, and art galleries, and is going to be 
as handsome as any city in the world, or know the rea- 
son why. 



CITIES 61 



BOSTON 

BOSTON is a slightly congested portion of Massa- 
chusetts, containing 700,000 mortals and sev- 
eral thousand descendants of the early colonial 
governors. It is the fifth city in size in the United 
States and as soon as it has increased its membership 
limit by taking in Cambridge, Somerville and Brook- 
line, which hedge it in on all sides, it will have a million 
people and citizens of St. Louis will expire in heaps 
from envy. 

Boston is a small city in area, but emits a vast 
amount of intellectual atmosphere, being full of univer- 
sities, institutes and high brow gymnasia of all sorts. 
This causes it to look coldly on the rude West and its 
people never weary of expressing in the most beautiful 
solid mahogany language their entire content with 
Boston. If a man hasn't a string of degrees after his 
name, which looks like the tail of a kite, he is received 
coldly in Boston, and is compelled to help govern the 
city for a living. Boston is run in the same old famil- 
iar way, and the third degree is the only degree with 
which its politicians are familiar. 

Boston has other peculiar prides, too. A Boston 
man never tows his visitors around to see a twenty- 
story ofBce building or a forty-acre factory. He talks 
about its public library and its ornamental river banks, 
its old churches, and its graveyards, and its history. 
Boston is so full of history that parts of the city are 
almost paved with brass memorial plates, while its 



62 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

graveyards are full of famous old patriots, and the 
newcomer who is not related to some prominent tomb- 
stone, stands a poor chance indeed. 

Boston abounds in chimney pots, ivy, street cars, 
spectacles, hallowed soil and old residences which are 
trying to disguise themselves as store buildings. Its 
only skyscraper is Bunker Hill Monument. A hotel, 
which once tried to elbow its way into the skyline, was 
rudely amputated at the eighth story by the depart- 
ment of pubKc art. The city has been growing larger 
for three hundred years, but still uses the same little 
old streets which were laid out with the seams in Gov- 
ernor Winthrop's crazy quilt for a pattern. It is in- 
deed a distressing sight to see a narrow and uncertain 
street, like Washington Street, trying to handle the re- 
tail business of a great metropolis, and to watch the 
street cars plowing through the mob and leaving the 
pedestrians in a great furrow on either side. Boston's 
most celebrated streets are Beacon Street, which was 
named from the literary lights which once resided on it 
and Commonwealth Avenue, so named because wealth is 
the only common thing on it. 

The modern parts of Boston are very beautiful and 
the city has thoughtfully provided a subway by which 
the stranger can pass under the business portion and 
the celebrated Boston Common without seeing them. 



DONATIONS FROM NATURE 

Nature has dumped scenery into the 
United States as the multi-millionaire dumps 
bonds onto his children. There is enough 
scenery in this country to keep a billion tour- 
ists busy at once but most of it has been 
thoughtlessly located far from the large 
cities and the best hotels. If the American 
should See America First with care and thor- 
oughness he would have to leave the job of 
seeing Europe to his heirs and assignees. 



I 



DONATIONS FROM NATURE 65 



THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS 

THE Rocky Mountains form the most prominent 
feature of America. Even man, who in this 
thunderous country has built 800-foot sky- 
scrapers, 1,000-acre factories and private residences 
so large that the butler answers the doorbell on roller 
skates, stands abashed and considerably impressed 
when he views these mountains, and does not even try 
to figure whether it would pay to remove them and 
plant the ground to turnips. 

The Rocky Mountains begin in Alaska and end at 
Cape Horn. The southern half, however, are under 
different management, and are incorporated under the 
name of the Andes. The Rocky Mountains proper 
are confined mostly to the western part of the United 
States, and for many years were about the only proper 
things in that section. They are not as well adver- 
tised as the Alps, and tourists do not spend so much 
time in passionate endeavors to climb them. But they, 
are much more expensively built. In fact, the material 
used in constructing the Rocky Mountains is of the 
very highest grade. Millions of tons of gold and sil- 
ver have been worked into the designs of the various 
peaks, regardless of expense. This has made the 
Rocky Mountains very popular among miners of all 
nations and tsome of their majestic flanks in Colorado 
are so badly pitted with prospect holes as to make the 
casual tenderfoot wonder if mountains are subject to 
smallpox. 



66 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

The Rocky Mountains first begin to dawn upon the 
casual traveler at the western edge of Kansas and Ne- 
braska, at which point they look like strips of baby 
ribbon on the horizon. As the traveler approaches 
they become more prominent until they finally congest 
the landscape and infringe considerably upon the ze- 
nith. Colorado is full of snow-covered peaks, from two 
to almost three miles in height, and the rankest amateur 
can go out from his hotel in man}^ a Colorado town 
and Climb far enough in a few minutes to fall 800 feet 
in no time at all. 

The Rocky Mountains occupy a great deal of what 
would otherwise be valuable farm land in this country 
and compel the transcontinental railroads to climb 
around their dizzy sides like cats upon a tin roof. But 
they keep the nation supplied with pocket money, wild 
west literature, grizzly bears, ozone and scenery, and 
now that the government is harnessing up the mountain 
streams, we may expect to see the day when the Rockies 
will do most of the heavy work for the nation. Much 
use can be made of a mountain if it is carefully tamed 
and taught to do such simple tricks as turning a tur- 
bine power wheel. 



DONATIONS FROM NATURE 67 



NIAGARA FALLS 

NIAGARA FALLS is a large body of water stood 
up on end and entirely surrounded by souve- 
nirs. 

It is the largest piece of perpendicular wetness in 
the world, and if it were not for the noise made by the 
tourists and the hotel runners in the vicinity its roar 
could be heard for many miles. 

Niagara Falls is the terminus of navigation on the 
Great Lakes. At a point within easy walking distance 
of 1,100 hotels, the Niagara River, half a mile wide, 
suddenly falls without any warning whatever over a 
precipice 164 feet high, forming the grandest sight in 
the universe, not excepting the horseshoe circle at New 
York Grand Opera. It is estimated that 500,000 peo- 
ple a year visit this cataract and most of them en- 
courage it by having their photographs taken while 
standing beside it with an air of approval. 

Niagara Falls was discovered by La Salle, who be- 
came aware of its presence while trying to paddle a 
canoe from Montreal to the Gulf of Mexico. He re- 
mained several months in the vicinity and came away 
without buying a single picture postal card, thus mak- 
ing a record which has never since been equaled. At 
this time Niagara was in a very wild and uncivilized 
state. Shortly after the Revolution, however, the falls 
were captured by the hackmen and have been in a 
state of captivity ever since. No cataract on earth 
has been so abused. It has been bridged, tunneled, 



68 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

navigated, jumped over, tight-roped and illuminated. 
For fifty cents one may ride up to it from below in a 
boat and puff cigarette smoke in its face. For a dol- 
lar one can go down behind it in a rubber suit and feel 
of its ribs. Once the Indians worshiped it and called 
it a God. Now tourists ride around it in trolley cars 
and excursionists throw ham sandwiches in it as a boy 
would throw peanuts to an elephant. 

Not only is Niagara Falls abused, but it is cruelly 
oppressed. It must turn the wheels of a hundred fac- 
tories. It runs the electric cars of Buffalo. It cooks 
the meals of Buffalo on electric ranges, heats the milk 
for the Buffalo babies, does the washing and runs the 
sewing machines in ten thousand homes, and at night, 
when other toilers are in bed, it must supply the lights 
for half a hundred towns, while an operator in over- 
alls turns a searchlight on it and exhibits it to tourists 
at 25 cents apiece. 

All this in New York State, which spends $100,000 
a year protecting the horse from overwork. 

Geologists say that Niagara Falls will last about 
1,543,000 years longer, but even geologists can't tell 
what legislatures will do. Almost half the water of 
Niagara is now being sneaked around through the 
power houses, and if it hadn't been for the pen of the 
newspaper man, which is mightier than the pull of the 
power hog, all the water would have been stolen by 
this time. Even now it is only a question of time until 
the name " Niagara Falls " must be changed to " Ni- 
agara Trickles," and when the great cataract will only 
be run on Sundays and holidays. 



DONATIONS FROM NATURE 69 



THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER 

THE Mississippi River was named by some Indian 
who had no other use for his " i's " or " s's " 
and means " Father of Waters." A more 
proper name would be the " Rockefeller of Waters," 
for the Mississippi is one of the greatest moisture 
trusts in the world. Beginning in Minnesota as a 
stream so small that it cannot even get an appropria- 
tion from Congress for its improvement, it rapidly ab- 
sorbs river after river until by the time it reaches the 
Gulf of Mexico it controls practically all the wetness 
between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians. 
That is one difference between a river and a trust, 
however. Mountains can stop a river, but only Prov- 
idence can stop a trust. 

The Mississippi is a mile wide after it gets its growth, 
and is deep enough between sandbars to float five-foot 
catfish above Cairo, and small sized battleships below. 
It only covers about 1200 miles as the aeroplane flies, 
but by taking a course like a taxicab driver who is 
carrying a total stranger, it manages to register over 
3,000 miles between Minnesota and the Gulf. It was 
discovered by De Soto, immortalized by Mark Twain, 
and improved by Eads, who did several million of dol- 
lars worth of dental work in its mouth. 

The Mississippi flows through, and sometimes over, 
a wonderfully fertile country, and is as inconvenient 
to have around as a prairie fire, owing to its restless- 
ness. It is more particular about its bed than a com- 



70 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

mercial traveler, and frequently changes it at night 
for the most frivolous reasons. It is also harder on 
banks than a cashier with a weakness for society. No 
bank is safe while it is around. With only a moderate 
appetite the Mississippi will eat ten miles of banks 
adorned with cornfields and cotton plantations in a sin- 
gle day. Each year it devours thousands of acres of 
fine farm land and carries it down to the Gulf of Mex- 
ico, where it adds to the area of Louisiana at the rate 
of one square mile a year. If the Mississippi doesn't 
get tired of Louisiana and move away, that State will 
soon be larger than Texas, and will extend clear to 
South America. Many an Illinois farmer has a valid 
claim to a farm in the Delta district of Louisiana, but 
cannot identify his property. 

In the spring the Mississippi rises rapidly to the 
second story of most of the towns along its banks, and 
conducts a spring house-cleaning, carrying off every- 
thing movable. During the spring of 1913 the river 
broke its height record and ruined over 200,000 south- 
ern citizens, who now regard it with less favor than 
they do the Republican Party. 

The Mississippi is navigated by snags, houseboats, 
motor boats, and occasional steamboats. If it were 
harnessed it would give power enough to light the 
United States, and if it were controlled it would carry 
the trafllc of the great Middle West. But Congress 
prefers to discuss tariflp schedules, which do not weary 
the brain so much. 



DONATIONS FROM NATURE 71 



THE GRAND CANYON 

THE Grand Canyon of the Colorado is a small 
scratch on the earth's surface made by Provi- 
dence to show man what an insignificant insect 
he is. It is 100 miles long, 13 miles wide and 6,000 feet 
deep. Viewed from Mars, it looks like a wrinkle on the 
face of Nature. Viewed from its brink, it is so awe- 
inspiring that even Commercial Travelers look at it in 
silence, and famous writers claw hopelessly for ade- 
quate adjectives. 

The Grand Canyon was made by the Colorado River 
about the time the mother-in-law joke was invented. 
The Colorado is not a large stream, but it has always 
been very busy. It has eaten its way through a mile 
of sandstone and a thousand feet of granite and has 
produced a chasm filled with weird temples of red, yel- 
low, white and black rock, 5,000 feet high. It is esti- 
mated that it has taken to accomplish this enough horse 
power to light a boulevard between here and the moon. 
One can always tell a power magnate by the way he 
weeps when he sees the canyon. 

The Colorado Canyon runs through a vast desert 
and begins without warning. At any point for a hun- 
dred miles, it would be possible for the casual wanderer 
to step off of the United States and to starve to death 
before he got through falling. This shows the wisdom 
of Nature. Had she placed the Canyon near New 
York, 100,000 people a year would fall into it, while in 
its present position it does not need to be fenced at 



72 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

all. However, owing to its isolated position, the Can- 
yon does not draw nearly as much tourist patronage 
as Niagara Falls, Mt. Vesuvius, Uncle Joe Cannon 
and other natural phenomena. More people see Coney 
Island in a night than see Colorado Canyon in a year. 
This is partly what is the matter with New York. 

The Canyon is located in Arizona, 65 miles away 
from the nearest drug store, and is already in the hands 
of a trust, there being only one railroad to it. It is 
so vast that thunder storms not only rage in it while 
the spectator watches them from above, but they some- 
times wander off and get lost in the side canyons. Its 
grandeur is heightened by the fact that not a single 
sign adorns its walls. In spite of the unparalleled op- 
portunity to announce the virtues of soaps and soups 
in letters half a mile high, no sign painter with 
nerve enough to tackle the job has been found. There 
is only one trail to the water below — the Bright An- 
gel Trail, named for the people who have fallen off; 
and by mounting a burro the tourist can find himself 
in two hours in a scene of utter desolation which has 
never been penetrated by the automobile, the book 
agent, the pianola, the harem skirt, the tariff question 
or the senatorial scandal. Many tourists have taken 
this spot for Paradise and have had to be removed by 
force. 

The Grand Canyon is the greatest natural curiosity 
in existence, and it is a comfort to reflect that no mat- 
ter what man may do to it, or how long he may keep 
on doing it, the results will only be visible through a 
strong glass. It is one thing in the world that is too 
big to be abused, 



DONATIONS FROM NATURE 73 



THE GREAT SALT LAKE 

THE Great Salt Lake is the American edition of 
the Dead Sea. Like everything American, it is 
an enlargement and improvement upon the orig- 
inal, having several times its area and being far bet- 
ter equipped for the tourist trade. 

The Great Salt Lake is 80 miles long and £0 to 30 
miles wide. It is also deep enough to drown the tallest 
man. However, the only way in which even a short 
man could drown in this lake, would be to tie a rope to 
the bottom and climb down. This is because of spe- 
cific gravity which the lake contains to excess. So 
strongly is the water impregnated with specific grav- 
ity, that human beings float in it without effort, their 
heads and toes above the surface. Floating in the 
Great Salt Lake is as easy as floating in New York so- 
ciety with only a title for support. However, the 
floater must be careful not to swallow any of the water 
in an unguarded moment. It is seven times more dis- 
agreeable than the most popular and beneficial mineral 
water, and even if it were to be distributed free, on elec- 
tion day in a Bowery precinct, no one would willingly 
drink it. 

This is because of its salt. We now approach the 
secret of this lake's name. It is from five to seven 
times as salt as the ocean, depending upon the industry 
of the sun in evaporating it from year to year. Fish 
cannot live in it — not even codfish — and vegetation 
for miles about it is extremely passe and dejected. 



74 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

Very little use has been found for the lake thus far, 
though thousands of gallons of it are sold in small bot- 
tles to tourists during the season. Even a bath in it 
is a delusion and a snare, as the bather has to wash off 
with a hose afterward. However, the lake does stand 
between Utah and the salt trust in a noble and efficient 
manner, and it furnishes Salt Lake City with one of 
the most novel summer resorts in captivity. 

The Great Salt Lake is remarkable for its fluctua- 
tions in size, surpassing in this respect the Republican 
vote. For many years it gained steadily in area 
until Salt Lake City became nervous during every rain- 
storm. Then it shrank until the bathing pavilion was 
far out in the desert. Now it is growing again. It is 
better equipped with railroad facilities than any other 
body of water, the Southern Pacific Railroad having 
built a bridge and causeway straight across it. After 
having viewed the marvelous energy of man at Niagara 
Falls and elsewhere, we can only feel thankful that the 
Southern Pacific did not move the lake away entirely 
instead of bridging it, thus wiping out a great national 
wonder. 



DONATIONS FROM NATURE 75 



THE YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK 

THE Yellowstone National Park is a public pleas- 
ure ground, maintained by the United States 
government for the enjoyment of the people and 
the brown bears of the nation. 

The park is typically American because of its size. 
It is the largest park open to the public anywhere. 
Many nations could not have a park of this size unless 
they borrowed some territory from their neighbors. 
It has about 3,500 square miles, and is not fenced in. 
This is carelessness, of course, and leads to some 
trouble, but the government has never had time to dig 
the post holes. 

The Yellowstone Park is situated in the northwest 
comer of Wyoming, about $125 from the center of pop- 
ulation, including Pullman fare. One might think 
from its inaccessibility that it was a postoffice, but in 
this case the government had some excuse. The park 
is where it is because it was impossible to move the scen- 
ery of which it is composed to some more centrally 
located spot. 

Scenery and natural curiosities are the strong points 
of the Yellowstone Park. It contains several moun- 
tain ranges, a plateau, a large number of canyons, a 
large lake, a 300-foot waterfall and a magnifi- 
cent collection of geysers. In fact the park has 
a monopoly of geysers in this country, and geyser lov- 
ers who do not like the price of admission are at lib- 
erty to jump off the dock. 



76 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

The Yellowstone Park is 11,000 feet high in some 
spots and in others reaches so far down that the water 
in the springs is red hot and smells of sulphur. Watch- 
ing the geyser throw water at the dog star, boil- 
ing eggs in the mud pots and escaping from the tame 
bear, catamounts, mountain lions and rattlesnakes 
are the favorite occupations of the tourists. Guns 
are not allowed in the park, and the bears and buffalo 
are so tame that they will frequently walk up to a shiv- 
ering stranger and attempt to borrow a chew from 
him. 

The Yellowstone Park has the grandest and weird- 
est scenery on this continent, and if it were near New 
York the government could make millions by charging 
admission. It also contains another great American 
curiosity — good roads. Automobilists who have trav- 
eled mostly in Illinois and Missouri frequently go to 
the park to see these roads alone. 



ARC LIGHTS 
IN OUR HISTORY 

No other country has produced so many 
100 per cent, pure patriots as America and 
in no other country has patriotism been so 
healthy a calling. The custom of pruning 
off a patriot below the chin which flourished 
for so many centuries in Europe has never 
prevailed on this side of the water and most 
of America's great men have died of their 
own accord and full of honors. 



hi 



( 



ARC LIGHTS IN OUR HISTORY 79 



GEORGE WASHINGTON 

GEORGE WASHINGTON, the Father of his 
Country, was born in Virginia, Feb. 22, 1732. 
He was the son of aristocratic parents and 
, spent his boyhood playing with the other scions of aris- 
I tocracy in Westmoreland County, most of whom be- 
came presidents of the United States later on. He 
was a great athlete, though nowadays he would be dis- 
qualified in a minute by the Amateur Athletic Associa- 
, tion for handling money, as he once threw a dollar 
I across the Potomac River. He was also an honest lad, 
( and when he chopped down a cherry tree and was asked 
! about it by his angry father he replied, " Father, I 
I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little hatchet." 
I The father was so relieved to find that the boy had not 
j used his expensive imported razor that he embraced him 
, and they lived happily ever after. 

Washington became a surveyor and also helped the 
! British army fight the French and Indians. He then 
I married and settled down on his estate to spend a happy 
1 life. But he had no children, and in order to fill the 
' vacant space in his heart he decided to adopt his coun- 
i try. This necessitated a great deal of fighting on his 
part, and from 1775 to 1781 he was almost continually 
I occupied in eradicating redcoats. He was often de- 
I feated, and was chased an aggregate of several thou- 
sand miles. His soldiers had little to eat and less to 
wear, and usually ran out of powder about the second 
round of each battle. If Washington had had the pow- 



8o SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 



der that is burned each Fourth of July nowadays 
in celebrating his victories he would have been a happy 
man and would have become a national parent much 
earlier in life. 

There was great opposition to Washington and all 
over the colonies men eagerly wore out dry goods boxes 
and store counters showing just how he could get much 
better results. He was cursed and maligned by large 
numbers of rich Tories, who wanted to let well enough 
alone. A price was set on his head by the British, and 
he often had to postpone dinner from day to day. But 
in the end he captured Cornwallis at Yorktown 
and everyone hastened to admit that he was a great 
man. 

In 1788 Washington was elected first President of 
the United States and served eight happy years undis- 
turbed by tariff squabbles, conservation agitation or 
invitations to dinner on the Pacific Coast. At the end 
of his second term he declined reelection and returned 
to his home at Mt. Vernon, where he died in 1799 from 
a consultation of physicians, complicated by a slight 
cold. He left a widow and an infant country, which 
was compelled to grow up without parental discipline 
and has felt the effects ever since. 

Washington could have been King of his people and 
he could have had great honor from Great Britain by 
refusing to insurge. But he chose to be president of a 
busted and struggling nation at a small salary and 
because he seems to have had the habit of thinking of 
his own interests last, the American people have built 
him a monument 555 feet high and have named moun- 
tains, rivers, states, counties, towns, boulevards and 
babies after him for over s century. 



ARC LIGHTS IN OUR HISTORY 81 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, America's tallest, homeli- 
est and greatest statesman, was born in Ken- 
tucky more than 100 years ago. He was an II- 
; linois man, but owing to the remarkably poor facilities 
for getting born in Illinois in 1809, he was compelled 
to choose Kentucky for a native State. Later on he 
lingered in Indiana long enough to acquire his first pair 
i of pants and came to Illinois a few years afterward, 
' when navigation had opened on the prairie roads. 
I Lincoln resolved to become great when a mere boy, 
' and as his parents were very poor, he had nothing to 
draw his attention from his task. He was not pes- 
' tered by society, did not have to perfect liimself in base- 
[ ball, pool, cigarette rolling, and taste in neckties, and 
I was in general free from the burdens of the unfortu- 
^ nate sons of the rich. By a singular good fortune, the 
only books he was able to borrow were useful ones. 
I Consequently, he arrived at manhood with an unlit- 
i tered brain and was able to become a leader of the Illi- 
j nois Legislature at an age when the educated youth of 
, to-day is still painfully paying off his college clothing 
1 bills in installments. 

I Lincoln was six feet four inches tall, very lanky, and 
j was so homely that he finally grew a beard as a rebuke 
j to his face. He early attracted attention by his hon- 
esty, and as soon as the people found that this was a 
habit, and not a policy, they repeatedly elected him to 
any office which happened to be handy. He was a 



82 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

great philosopher, and understood the political ques- 
tions of the day so thoroughly that he was able to illus- 
trate them by funny stories which would make him more 
money on the vaudeville stage to-day, than he ever made 
out of politics. In his youth, he was a champion rail- 
splitter, and this skill afterwards enabled him to split 
the Democratic Party with such success that he became 
President in 1861. 

Lincoln had always been opposed to slavery, and 
made a practice of alluding to this fact even in sections 
where abolitionism was more unhealthy than malaria. 
When he was elected, the South seceded, and for four 
years Lincoln piloted his country through the greatest 
civil war of history. There were cannons in front of 
him, " copperheads " behind him, and advisers on all 
sides of him, but he bore up against all these perils 
with such firmness, and bravery, and kindness, and pa- 
triotism, and tact, and common sense, and humor, that 
the world took off its hat to him and has never put it 
back. When he was assassinated in 1865, he was so 
well beloved that men called him beautiful when they 
looked at him. 

Some men require fifteen years of schooling to be- 
come wise. Lincoln's wisdom was home made, and the 
pattern has never been duplicated. He showed the 
world how to become an orator in 200 words, which is 
still 9900 below the average record; moreover, he 
proved that it is as easy to be wise in short stories and 
jokes, as it is in fourteen-syllabled words. Like a 
great mountain peak, he looms higher as he recedes 
from us, and to-day all parties claim to have sprung 
from his ideas. 



ARC LIGHTS IN OUR HISTORY 83 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was an ordinary man 
with an extraordinary supply of common sense, 
who flourished in the eighteenth century and is 
still regarded as one of the finest of American prod- 
ucts. 

Franklin was born in Boston, but was one of the few 
, Boston wise men to succeed in getting away from that 
city. His family was not distinguished, and when he 
, left Boston, after having run a newspaper with more 
I brilliance than success, no committee of city officials 
f appeared to bid him good-by. 

i Franklin arrived in Philadelphia with enough money 
I left to buy two rolls of bread, and paraded the town 
I wearing one loaf under his arm and eating the other. 
I This successfully quarantined him from Philadelphia 
\ society, and he was enabled to put all his time into the 
' printing business with such success that he was sent 
I to London in 1724 by the governor to get a printing 
I outfit. He worked for eighteen months in a London 
j printing house and was probably the most eminent em- 
) ploye that London journalism ever had, though Eng- 
j land has not yet waked up to this fact. 
] Franklin then returned to Philadelphia and pur- 
1 chased the Gazette, which he began to edit with such 
success that he frequently had to spend all day making 
change for eager subscribers. It might be well to men- 
tion here that at this time he was only twenty-three 
years old, having been born Jan. 17, 1706, and having 



84 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

been a full-fledged editor at the age of fifteen. Genius 
often consists in getting an early start and keeping 
started. 

At the age of twenty-six Franklin's " Poor Rich- 
ard's Almanac," the sayings of a wise old man, had the 
largest circulation of anything printed in the Colonies, 
and people sought his advice on everything from love 
to chicken raising. At the age of thirty-one he was a 
member of the Pennsylvania Assembly. At forty he 
had diagnosed lightning, and had exhibited the first 
electricity ever in captivity in a bottle, having caught 
it with a kite string and a key. He had also charted 
the course of North American storms, and explained 
the Gulf Stream. 

Franklin helped the Colonies to declare their inde- 
pendence and secured the treaty of alliance with France. 
At seventy-nine he was elected governor of Pennsyl- 
vania. At eighty-two he helped write the Constitu- 
tion of the United States. He also devised the Amer- 
ican postal system. He died at the age of eighty-four, 
and Philadelphia is prouder of his tombstone than she 
is of the Liberty Bell. 

Through all his long and busy life Franklin never 
had tim.e to dress up and adopt the social usages of his 
day. But this did not prevent him from dazzling the 
exquisite court of France at its most brilliant and use- 
less period. He was one of the few men who gave to 
the earth more wisdom than he absorbed from it, but 
he never was a bonanza for the tailors. Had he spent 
his youth keeping four tailors and three haberdashers 
in affluence, Franklin relics would probably not com- 
mand the high price which they now do. 



ARC LIGHTS IN OUR HISTORY 85 



THOMAS JEFFERSON 

THOMAS JEFFERSON, the third President of 
the United States, and the most famous red- 
headed man since JuHus Caesar's time, was bom 
on April 13, 1743, in a state of affluence, and also in 
Virginia, both of which states were regarded at that 
time by future presidents as the most favorable in 
which to be born. Jefferson's father was a planter, 
which is a de luxe edition of a farmer, and the young 
Thomas grew up with all the luxuries of the time, in- 
cluding books, white satin pants and a college educa- 
tion. He was a talented writer and had he lived to- 
day would have successfully concealed himself from 
posterity by publishing valuable articles in the high 
brow magazines. 

As it was, however, he was compelled to go into the 
law. When the Colonies met in convention in Phila- 
delphia in 1776, Jefferson, then a young man, wrote 
the Declaration of Independence, which speedily be- 
came a best seller and has promoted the sale of gun- 
powder on the Fourth of July ever since. Some peo- 
ple assert that this act was fatal to Jefferson, because 
the Declaration was signed on the Fourth of July, and 
its author expired on the same date. However, there 
was a margin of fifty years between cause and effect, 
and Jefferson's sad fate at the age of eighty-three 
should not deter other young patriots with declara- 
tions to write. 

After the Colonies revolted, Jefferson began hold- 



86 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

ing office and continued to do so with great tenacity 
and continuity, finally becoming vice-president in John 
Adams' administration. Jefferson was deeply opposed 
to Adams and Massachusetts and ostentation and other 
things, and became an insurgent on 1675 counts. He 
defeated Adams in 1800, and became President, ruling 
the country with great firmness and diplomacy for 
eight years. On his inauguration day, he rode his 
horse into Washington, tied him to a post and took 
the oath of office without frills or fuss. This was 
hailed as a magnificent example of simplicity, but in 
reality it was a magnificent example of prudence. 
Washington had just been laid out and was guiltless 
of sidewalks or pavement. The spring rain had set in 
and if Jefferson had tried to reach the Capitol in a 
coach, he would have been inaugurated about 1814. 

Jefferson interpreted the constitution with great 
strictness, except when it became necessary to use 
common sense, when he substituted the latter with great 
success, annexing Louisiana in a manner that deeply 
shocked the conservatives of his time. He introduced 
rotation in office and continued to be a firm friend 
of the people throughout his administration. In 1808 
he introduced the custom of bequeathing the presidency 
to a personal friend, and elected James Madison. He 
then retired to his home at Monticello and spent his 
latter years founding the University of Virginia and 
entertaining visitors, which he did so lavishly and per- 
sistently that he died a ruined man in everything but 
fame, honor and affection. He was the only president 
who did not belong to a church, but he conducted a 
guerilla warfare for uprightness with great success and 
left an untarnished name. 



ARC LIGHTS IN OUR HISTORY 87 



ULYSSES S. GRANT 

ULYSSES S. GRANT was the world's greatest 
illustration of what lack of perseverance can 
accomplish and also what can be done by 
sticking everlastingly to it. 

Grant was born in Ohio, April 27, 1822, and because 
his father knew a Congressman he went to West Point 
and became a soldier, standing at the foot of his class 
in mathematics, French, tatting and bed-making, but 
riding a horse in a manner which produced the pro- 
foundest respect in said horse. On his graduation he 
fought in the Mexican War and then gave up the army 
and went into business. 

Grant became a tanner and might have become a 
great and rich man in about 300 years by this method. 
But he did not stick to it, and when the Civil War 
opened he entered the army again, and owing to his 
quiet but inimitable system of reducing the enemy to 
a few scattered remains, he became Lieutenant-General, 
the highest honor ever conferred on an American sol- 
dier, and started for Richmond. If he had been as casual 
as he had been in business he would never have gotten 
there, but although for weeks at a time the air was so 
full of Confederate cannon balls that breathing was 
extremely difficult, he pushed steadily on and took Rich- 
mond after a dozen generals had given up the job. 

The war was now ended, and as soon as possible the 
grateful people elected Grant President, He served 
two terms with much dignity and nobility of character, 



88 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

and then made a trip around the world, thus enabUng 
other nations to take a hasty look at the greatest sol- 
dier since Napoleon. He then retired to New York, 
where in his old age a publishing house failed and ru- 
ined him and he was attacked by cancer of the throat. 

Grant now began a battle which made the engage- 
ments in the Wilderness seem trivial and comfortable. 
Fighting off death as sternly as he had ever fought ofF 
Lee, he kept him waiting outside until he had com- 
pleted his memoirs in two large volumes and had thus 
insured his family against want. The nation watched 
the battle with throbbing suspense, and when he won 
the fight and leaned back to die in peace, it was felt 
that no victory of the great war had done him so much 
honor. 

There will be very few Grants in history because Na- 
ture had to use up a whole year's supply of iron in 
fashioning his will when she made him. 



ARC LIGHTS IN OUR HISTORY 89 



HENRY CLAY 

OF all Americans who flourished in the first half 
of the last century, there was none more pon- 
derous than Henry Clay. For twenty-five 
years he was the biggest man in his country and six 
times during that period he stood around, hat in hand, 
and watched some smaller-sized American being inaugu- 
rated president. 

Clay was born in Virginia, April 12, 1777. His fa- 
ther died when he was five and soon afterwards he be- 
gan supporting his family in true presidential timber 
style. At fifteen he was a clerk at Richmond. At 
twenty-one he was a lawyer in Lexington, Ky., and 
marching on towards fame with giant leaps. 

Clay entered politics as soon as he had bought his 
office desk. He immediately became known as a fine 
orator. He acquired the art by practicing in the 
cornfields instead of upon after-dinner prisoners, and 
thus won the love of all. At twenty-three he was a 
legislator, and at twenty-nine he was senator from Ken- 
tucky. Everyone predicted that he would be Presi- 
dent as soon as he was old enough and there was some 
criticism of the Constitution, because it compelled him 
to hang around until the age of thirty-five before as- 
suming the office. 

Clay led a busy life in his thirties, fighting duels, 
helping draw up the treaty of Ghent and serving as 
Speaker of the House of Representatives. In 1824 he 
was a candidate for president, and when the election 



go SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

got into the House of Representatives, he helped elect 
John Quincy Adams, thus winning the undying hate of 
Andrew Jackson, who was the most fluent and success- 
ful hater of those times. This made Clay's life a bur- 
den to him, knocked him out of the presidency with 
great frequency, compelled him to load up his dueling 
pistols time and again, and kept him busy explaining 
the rest of his life. 

From 1824 to 1850 Clay was so big a man that he 
had to settle every national quarrel. Those were im- 
patient and warlike days, and a dozen times the country 
showed signs of parting in the middle during some dead- 
lock in Congress. On each occasion Clay was called on 
to arrange a compromise, and he always succeeded, not 
only in patching up peace, but in winning a lot of per- 
manent enemies. Now and then he would run for 
President, at which times these enemies would band to- 
gether and hold parades which were hours in passing a 
igiven point. He died in 185,2, a disappointed man, 
after having postponed the Civil War for thirty years. 

Clay's fate would probably have been different if he 
had not compromised so much. He was always ready 
to load up a horse pistol and fight a political opponent, 
but he could not bear to see his country quarrel, and he 
got what peacemakers usually get. 



ARC LIGHTS IN OUR HISTORY 91 



ALEXANDER HAMILTON 

ALEXANDER HAMILTON, one of the largest 
sized young men in history, was born in the 
West Indies, January 11, 1757. 

For twelve years Hamilton lived like other boys and 
suffered the indignity of being patronized and ordered 
around by grown-ups. Then his father failed in busi- 
ness and he went into a store to earn his living. In a 
year or two he was managing the store. 

Hamilton made a great success in business and in his 
spare moments he wrote up a cyclone for the local 
paper so brilliantly that his neighbors clubbed together 
and sent him to New York to college. On just such lit- 
tle points history balances. If they had sent him to 
England the United States might have been sold off 
for junk over 100 years ago. 

Hamilton entered King's College, now Columbia Uni- 
versity, at seventeen and a few months later was mak- 
ing speeches urging the colonists to rise and swat the 
tyrants. At eighteen he had a wide reputation as a 
writer of political pamphlets. At nineteen he was a 
captain of artillery in the Revolution. At twenty- 
four, a veteran of the late war, he began to manage the 
new fledged republic. 

Hamilton served in the Continental Congress the next 
year and soon after called a general constitutional 
convention to save the country. When the Constitu- 
tion was adopted he wrote essays on it for the Federal- 
ist and people used to go three blocks to meet the 



92 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

postman on the day the paper came out. He became 
Secretary of the Treasury which at this time had a 
few counterfeit dollars and some old porous plasters 
in it and in a few years he filled that treasury so full 
that it has never been empty since. Before he was 
thirty-five he declined to become Chief Justice and re- 
tired to a well-earned rest. 

Hamilton never became president but enjoyed him- 
self making presidents and then standing in the wings 
and prompting them. He helped Washington through 
two terms and then suggested that Adams be elected. 
Adams then proceeded to Taftize all of Hamilton's 
friends in the government, and during the next election, 
without Hamilton's help, he ran like a stone dog set in 
concrete. Jefferson and Burr tied for the Presidency 
and Hamilton persuaded Congress to elect Jefferson. 

Burr never forgave this and after Hamilton had 
helped defeat him for the governorship of New York, 
Burr challenged him to a duel. It was fought at Wee- 
hawken and Burr got his revenge. 

Hamilton was forty-seven years old when he died. 
He had fought in one war, staved off two others, or- 
ganized a republic, financed it and had elected three 
presidents. Still there are people who believe that 
young men should be seen and not heard. 



ARC LIGHTS IN OUR HISTORY 93 



JOHN QUINCY ADAMS 

ON July 11, 1767, John Quincy Adams, sixth 
president of the United States, was born in 
Massachusetts. His name is not a household 
word and his face does not appear on any postage 
stamp. Yet no American ever stirred up more ill- 
feeling during his life or was busier doing it or had a 
larger public career or more patriotism to the square 
inch or contributed more ancestors and descendants to 
" Who's Who In America." 

Adams was an infant prodigy. The Adams' had 
been great people for several generations, and when 
John Quincy was born, his father, John, was helping 
to form the United States of America, and was already 
thinking out a few hasty remarks to make when he be- 
became president. John Quincy Adams was a learned 
man at ten, and was secretary to an embassy to Russia 
at fifteen. He was a small, pale lad with a head Kke 
a planet and he kept on stujBfing it with Latin and po- 
litical economy and history until when he graduated 
from Harvard people used to verify their encyclopedias 
by him. 

John Quincy was a born insurgent and attacked 
everything violently and ably. He went into politics 
early and became an ambassador, a special commis- 
sioner and a senator, insurging himself out of office each 
time with great cheerfulness. Later he taught rhetoric 
in Harvard and did odd jobs such as writing treaties 
and doing cabinet work under Monroe. He was uni- 



94 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

versally admired for his learning and the way in which 
his vast poKshed dome of reason got pink and flushed 
while he fed nine-sjllabled eloquence to his opponents, 
and in 1824 he was elected president by one vote. His 
old father, who had been president a quarter of a cen- 
tury before, had hung around until he was past ninety 
for the sake of conducting his son to the White House, 
and he died happy the next year. 

John Quincy Adams served four years with great 
conscientiousness and no tact, standing firmly for every- 
thing nobody else wanted, and making enemies with al- 
most inconceivable ardor. He was defeated for reelec- 
tion by an enormous majority, but did not mind it, 
having long been accustomed to defeat. He didn't sit 
around waiting for the people to decide what to do with 
their ex-president, but at once plunged into a new po- 
litical career, going to Congress on an Abolition plat- 
form. He served seventeen years and dropped dead in 
1848 in the middle of his 1187th speech against the 
slave traffic. 

John Quincy Adams is famous chiefly as a man who 
was willing at any time to be clubbed over the head be- 
cause of his principles. He is also growing in fame 
constantly as an ancestor. His sons and grandsons be- 
came famous, and the Adams' are still asked to sit on 
the stage at all public gatherings in Massachusetts. 



ARC LIGHTS IN OUR HISTORY 95 



ANDREW JACKSON 

ON March 15, 1767, astronomers noticed most of 
the planets in violent opposition and insurrec- 
tion, and shortly afterward Andrew Jackson, 
seventh president of the United States, was bom in a 
log cabin in North Carolina. 

Jackson immediately began to fight his way to the 
front, having no father and no bank account to help 
him. He was a man w^ho viewed with indignation prac- 
tically everything that he saw in his long and sizzling 
life. He fought men, parties, Indians, States and for- 
eign powers with the utmost impartiality and enthusi- 
asm, and had the dove of peace on toast for breakfast 
every morning. When a mere boy he refused to black 
a British oflScer's boots, and had his head laid open by 
the officer's sword. Later In life he caught another 
British general at New Orleans, and licked him out of 
his boots by way of repartee. He caused more Indian 
obituaries than anyone in his time, and he counted that 
day lost in which he did not go out and fight a duel 
with someone who had aspersed his honor, or his party, 
or his opinions, or his wife, or his best friend, or his 
cousin's niece's nephew. 

Jackson had no education to speak of, but was full 
of high tension, and million volt opinions. He became 
the leading Democratic statesman of Tennessee, largely 
because of his strong constitution. He insurged against 
every president from Washington to Monroe, and after 
he had retired of old age, ran against John Quincy 



96 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

Adams, being beaten by one vote. He immediately be- 
gan the next campaign and four years later, having an- 
nihilated Adams, took the reins of state and began driv- 
ing the band wagon over the office holders of the Whig 
Party. 

Jackson served eight years, and was as comfortable 
an executive as a buzz saw. He ejected office holders 
who didn't assay ninety-nine per cent. Democrat, fired 
cabinet officials whose wives didn't fulfill their social 
duties, being the only man on record to handle the of- 
ficial wife problem successfully, spanked South Caro- 
lina, threatened France, bluffed England and kept the 
ship of state rocking on a strong gale. He had a 
strong antipathy to the National Bank, and when he 
had finished with it, its friends did not recognize the re- 
mains. He was shot at by an assassin, but immediately 
retorted with his cane so vigorously that the man's life 
was saved only by the intercession of friends. In 1836 
he elected Martin Van Buren president, and retired to 
the Hermitage, near Nashville, Tenn., where he gradu- 
ally cooled off and became extinct in 1845. 

Jackson is revered as an earnest, sincere man who 
backed up his beliefs with anything handy, and was 
as honest as his own powder. According to our post- 
age stamps, he was thin and stem of face with tall, fierce 
hair and a horse collar coat. He rose from obscurity 
by his own efforts, and no efforts of his traducers in the 
past century have sufficed to push him back. 



LEADING CITIZENS 

The United States is full of leading citi- 
zens. Some of them are leading us onward 
and upward; some of them are leading us 
backward and downward; and some of them 
are leading us the way a stone hitching post 
leads a span of tethered mules. 



/ 



/ 



] 





LEADING CITIZENS 99 



WOODROW WILSON 

WOODROW WILSON, Democrat, is one of 
America's most fortunately unlucky men. 
Four times during his life he has had a fine 
career blasted and prematurely closed and has had to 
step into something better. 

When Wilson was a young man, he studied law, and 
opened an office in Atlanta, where, had he remained, 
he might have risen to eminence and acquired a big busi- 
ness manufacturing loopholes for corporations. But 
he knew so much about history that he was compelled to 
give up the law and go back to Princeton University 
where he remained for several years teaching and writ- 
ing. He was beginning to get a reputation as a his- 
torian, to say nothing of a check every few months from 
some publishing house, when another great misfortune 
struck him down. He had to give up history and be- 
come a college president. 

Undiscouraged by this, Wilson pulled himself to- 
gether and ran Princeton College for many years. He 
was beginning to be reverenced for his prospective gray 
hairs by the college body, when in 1910 he received an- 
other jolt. He was compelled to resign as president 
of Princeton and become Governor of New Jersey ; and 
once more with his new work just begun has had to lay 
it down and become president of the United States. 

Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia fifty-eight 
years ago and has been the eighth native born Vir- 
ginian to load his furniture on the Alexandria ferry 



loo SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

and slip across into the White House. He is a studious 
man with a large hand-carved face, George Ade lips, 
and scholastic, reenforced eyes. He is a lieutenant- 
general of words, and when he is discussing the theories 
of government, has to be translated to Democratic pre- 
cinct leaders by some personal friend of the dictionary. 
Wilson left the law because he knew so much of his- 
tory — he left history because he knew so much about 
teaching; he left his college because he knew so much 
politics, and he left the state house because he knew so 
much about politicians. He is a Princeton graduate, 
a golfer and a father-in-law of brief standing. He 
has few friends in Washington but tKis is encouraging. 
The president who begins with many Washington 
friends generally loses them by doing his duty. While 
the president who retires with more friends than he had 
when he began is missed by them exclusively. 



LEADING CITIZENS loi 



ROOSEVELT 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT is a portable volcano 
who has been roaming through history over the 
frames of the suffering opposition for the last 
thirty-one years. He is best known as an ex-president 
of the United States, but is also celebrated as an au- 
thor, an editor, a hunter and a father, while Fate in 
making him a statesman spoiled a mighty good pugilist, 
lumberman, broncho buster, preacher, policeman, col- 
lege president, ward politician and professor of physical 
culture. 

Roosevelt was bom in 1858 but had no marked in- 
fluence on the Civil War. He hurried through his 
youth and Harvard University, arriving in the New 
York legislature at the age of twenty-three and begin- 
ning a civil service reform a few minutes later. Since 
then he has battled against one thing or another 
continually, his opponents, including Tammany, De- 
mocracy, the spoils system, Spaniards, the Bishop of 
London, panthers, bears, catamounts, lions, tigers, 
Egyptian anarchists, race suicide, Tom Piatt, and 
Lorimer. He is now busily engaged in planting a new 
crop of enemies to keep him happy and militant until 
death doth him part. 

Roosevelt is a stout, thick, wide, deep, explosive man 
with a square head, belligerent hair, dejected downtrod- 
den mustache, large teeth which glisten like tombstones 
while he is dismembering the opposition in seven-sylla- 



102 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

bled words and a full-armored fighting under jaw which 
holds the marksmanship record in American politics. 

Roosevelt is now fifty-six years old and has found 
time, besides presidenting seven years, to raise a family 
of six children and one grandchild, to reform New York, 
to write a medium sized library, to learn to fry bear 
steaks, to lose his fortune in the cattle business, to ac- 
quire a backhand return in tennis, to go to war, to do 
heavy siege gun duty as editor, to clean up the New 
York police, to preach to several nations and to be in- 
terviewed 1,879,543 times. Five years ago he retired 
from active life at the age of fifty-one and went home 
to Oyster Bay. By exploring Africa, organizing a new 
political party, editing a magazine and touring South 
America he has been able to amuse himself and survive 
this period successfully. But he is said to be tiring of 
inactivity. Those wishing volcanoes capped or oceans 
pushed back off of their property would do well to give 
him a trial. 



LEADING CITIZENS 103 



THOMAS A. EDISON 

THOMAS A. EDISON Is one of America's greatest 
men. He was not elected to this position nor 
did he obtain it by guessing which way some 
prominent railway stock might jump. Other American 
giants may fail to receive a majority and shrink into 
common tax payers ; they may absorb one railway too 
many and retire to obloquy a few jumps ahead of the 
grand jury. But Edison goes placidly on increasing 
his size each year; and he will continue to do so as long 
as electricity enjoys the popularity which it does at the 
present time. 

Edison started life selling peanuts on the Grand 
Trunk Railway at the age of twelve in 1859, from which, 
with the aid of mathematics in its present highly per- 
fected state, we may easily deduce the fact that he is 
now sixty-seven years of age. He published a news- 
paper at the age of fifteen and learned telegraphy a 
year later, but caused much profanity because of his 
fondness for reading while some operator at the other 
end of the line was frantically pounding away in an ef- 
fort to attract his attention. In fact, at this period 
Edison was so unsuccessful that he had to take up in- 
venting. The field was remarkably broad at that time, 
very few things worth while having been invented, and 
Edison was soon busy day and night. He Invented the 
telegraph repeater and the stock ticker, and sold them 
for a small fortune. 

This was the most perilous point In Edison's career. 



104 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

But he passed safely through it. He did not buy an 

automobile, go to Europe or establish his family in so- 
ciety. He did not buy a carload of assorted mining 
stock or go to New York and try to put a permanent 
crimp in Wall Street. Instead, he took his $40,000 and 
went to New Jersey, which at that time was infested 
with nothing worse than mosquitoes. There he built a 
laboratory and began to work up an intimate acquaint- 
ance with electricity, wliich was then almost a stranger 
in our midst. 

Edison has remained in New Jersey ever since. He 
has made three hundred inventions, including the pho- 
nograph, the telephone transmitter, the aerophone, the 
megaphone, the incandescent lamp, the moving picture 
and the long distance storage battery. He has become 
very rich indeed, but this is not often mentioned. He is 
more interesting than his bank account. 

Edison was never elected to any office. Nobody 
knows what clubs he belongs to. He does not play golf, 
and few people have seen him in evening clothes. He 
is a genius, and the proof of it is that he works for 
twenty hours a day for long stretches. 

In 1876, says his biographer, Edison's health failed. 
This is important information, and thousands of Amer- 
icans would give much to acquire the same brand of 
rickety health. A busted constitution which will keep 
its owner happy and busy twenty hours a day for forty 
years is a boon greatly to be desired. 



LEADING CITIZENS 105 



JANE ADDAMS 

AMERICA has contained a great many famous 
women, of whom probably, the Goddess of Lib- 
erty and Jane Addams, of Chicago, are the most 
popular at present. 

Many an American girl has begun her career with 
only a plain gown and a Sunday dress and had landed 
in the White House later on. Thus far, this has been 
due to their extraordinary sagacity in picking hus- 
bands. The first duty of the American woman, who de- 
sires to spend four years in the White House bossing 
the cook, is to marry a man who is a good, fluent vote- 
getter. Miss Addams has ignored this duty for many 
years ; yet she is nearer the White House than many a 
woman who has gone valiantly forth and married the 
raw material of a cabinet minister. For, if woman con- 
tinues to march briskly through custom and precedent 
as she has been doing of late, some American woman 
may yet be elected president — and in this case those 
patriots who desire to represent this nation in foreign 
diplomatic fields had better become original Addams 
men. 

Miss Addams is not the best known American woman, 
but she could probably get twice as many votes for 
president as any other. She is a quiet, demure lady 
who runs a citizen repair shop in Chicago. Many 
years ago she went over back of the Chicago River, 
where the ten commandments were unknow^n and the 
statutes of Illinois were only suspected. She has lived 



io6 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

there ever since, setting a sort of pattern of successful 
and sanitary citizenship. The neighborhood has fol- 
lowed the pattern and now sends out teachers to wrestle 
with the plutocratic sections of darkest Chicago in an 
effort to bring them up to its standard. 

Miss Addams built Hull House, where human beings 
are renovated at a very small expense. In those days, 
locomotives, ships and corn planters were designed with 
great skill, but the citizen was fashioned by father Time 
without any hindrance from anyone. Since then, how- 
ever, it has become the custom to supervise the design- 
ing of citizens with some care, and as Miss Addams 
was a pioneer in the business, she spends much of her 
time lecturing, and Hull House is one of Chicago's most 
popular hotels. 

Miss Addams is not as loud as some of our leading 
prima donnas by several whoops, but some of her quiet- 
est remarks have gone around the world several times. 
She IS one of the most successful Americans — but is 
not rated in Bradstreets. 



LEADING CITIZENS 107 



WILLIAM J. BRYAN 

WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN, owner of an 
undivided half of the Democratic Party of 
this nation, was born in lUinois in 1860, and 
began the discussion of pohtics a few months later. At 
the age of nineteen, he was winning oratorical contests 
for Illinois College. At the age of twenty-seven, he 
was addressing a few seething remarks to the Repub- 
lican Party in Nebraska, from which it has never en- 
tirely recovered. At the age of thirty-one, he began 
trying out new and deadlier forms of oratory upon 
Congress ; and at the age of thirty-six, he rose in the 
Democratic National Convention and swept the party 
into his pocket with a few deft words. 

Mr. Bryan then began to run for president, a habit 
of which he has only recently and with the greatest 
difficulty broken himself. He was almost the first presi- 
dential candidate to run for the office by train instead of 
by rocking chair. When Mr. Bryan runs for president 
he climbs onto the back platform of a train and for 
months afterwards section hands along his line of march 
pick large reverberating words out of the surrounding 
scenery. Mr. Bryan holds the long distance record for 
oratory, having often spoken for 1,000 miles at a 
stretch, with only short pauses between stations. 

Mr. Bryan is now fifty-four years old. He is a short, 
heavy-set man with a wide gauge face and a forehead 
which extends well down the other side of his dome of 
reason. He wears his remaining hair long and dark 



io8 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

and Is not addicted to whiskers. He Is a plainly 
dressed man with plain, unvarnished ways and half the 
people of the West have talked with him at one time or 
another on the local trains on which he has spent so 
much of his life. 

Mr. Bryan has been a lawyer, soldier, author and 
traveler, as well as a candidate. At present, he Is an 
editor, farmer, Chautauqua lecturer and cabinet officer. 
He Is also one of the few orators remaining In captivity 
and In all history few men have known more of the art 
of producing a shimmering sentence of silver eloquence 
and coiling It around the unwary listener until he is a 
shouting captive. He Is the greatest lecturer In the 
cabinet and he is also the greatest secretary of state on 
the lecture platform to-day. 



LEADING CITIZENS 109 



JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER 

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, one of the most fre- 
quently mentioned citizens of the United States, 
hves in a county near New York City, which he 
has made over into a very handsome front yard. He 
also has a residence in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lived 
many years, and is acquainted with several people, 

Mr. Rockefeller is famous in more ways than any 
other American, with the possible exception of that 
sterling athlete, hunter, author, explorer, woodchopper, 
warrior, preacher, historian, father and statesman, Col. 
Roosevelt. Mr. Rockefeller is one of the most noted 
golfers in the country. He has never won a cup, but 
he is the only golfer who rides after his ball on a bicycle. 

Mr. Rockefeller is also the nation's most famous 
Sunday school teacher. He has a large class in New 
York City and it was on account of his talks to young 
men on how to succeed that he was elected to honorary 
membership in the American Press Humorists' Associa- 
tion some years ago. 

Mr. Rockefeller is also noted for his extravagance. 
Money slips through his hands like water. No sooner 
does he save a cent a gallon on the price of transporting 
oil than he lets go of a million dollars to some college 
or other. He blew in $25,000,000 on Chicago Univer- 
sity in ten years, thus putting the record of the most 
extravagant senior to shame. With him it is a case of 
saving at the spigot and wasting on the General Edu- 
cation Board. He has spent $120,000,000 in the last 



no SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

twenty years. If it were not for a little Standard Oil 
stock — say about $500,000,000 worth — he would be 
a poor man to-day. 

Mr. Rockefeller also has the most famous head of 
hair in the country. When he bought it reporters 
wrote columns about it. 

Mr. Rockefeller, moreover, is famous for his exclu- 
siveness. He does not go to tango teas or Europe, and 
has never been elected to office. He is personally known 
to very few citizens. He is so retiring that when the 
government wished to serve a witness subpoena on him, 
some years ago, it took a hundred deputy sheriffs sev- 
eral weeks to find him. 

Mr. Rockefeller is the most famous ex-dyspeptic in 
the country. Twenty years ago he could not swallow 
anything except dry toast and competing companies. 
Of late years, however, he has cut out both of these ar- 
ticles of diet and eats everything else with impunity. 

Mr. Rockefeller was born in New York State in 1839 
and is a self-made man. He used to sell oil for a liv- 
ing, but retired some years ago, long after his compet- 
itors had started life over again. 



LEADING CITIZENS iii 



CORNELIUS J. McGILLICUDDY 

CORNELIUS J. McGILLICUDDY is not known 
abroad, and will probably never have his right- 
ful place in the American hall of fame. Histori- 
ans ignore him; statesmen do not take him seriously, 
and students of political economy try to look him up in 
the encyclopaedia with no success at all. Yet Mr. Mc- 
Gillicuddy stands to-day one of the most eminent of 
Americans ; a citizen admired by millions and a man 
whose opinion on certain subjects will be printed under 
flaring headlines all over the country at a time when 
the President of the United States would have to de- 
clare war with Mexico in order to edge into the popular 
interest. 

Mr. McGillicuddy's birthplace, age and early career 
are unimportant. His name is even more so. He was 
named by an Irish father, who had plenty of time and 
I who used to call his son in from play by chapters. 
Cornelius wore his full name, summer and winter for 
many years, but found that it was continually getting 
tangled among his feet at critical moments. For this 
reason he pruned it down some years ago and became 
Connie Mack. 

Mr. Mack, it is necessary to explain only to Eski- 
mos, English visitors and the Egyptian mummy in the 
Metropolitan Museum of Art, is manager of the Phila- 
delphia baseball team. Since Mr. Chance declined and 
fell, he has been the greatest manager at large. Mr. 
McGraw has a way of winning pennants that has been 



112 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

greatly admired, but Mr. Mack does not stop with pen- 
nants. He proceeds further and picks up world's 
championships with the ease and grace of a Los Ange- 
les citizen picking oranges from his bedroom window. 

Three times, in the last four years, Mr. Mack's cele- 
brated baseball team has met after the season for the 
purpose of discussing the world's championship with 
some other aggregation. The discussions have always 
been brief to the point of rudeness. Mr. Mack's men 
have a way of injecting a home run into the conversa- 
tion at an unexpected place in such a way as to unhinge 
the opposition and cast a gloom over the entire city of 
New York, lasting upwards of six months. 

Mr. Mack began life as a poor boy, equipped only 
with prehensile fingers and a hair trigger thinkery. 
He nows owns two baseball teams — Eddie Collins and 
the rest of the Philadelphia club. Because of his suc- 
cess, a good many boys, who once aspired to become, 
President, have wavered, and are studying pinch-hit- 
ting. 



LEADING CITIZENS 113 



JUDGE LYNCH 

NEXT to John Doe, Judge Lynch is the most fa- 
mous disreputable character in the United 
States. He is a native citizen and cannot be 
charged up to immigration, either. 

Judge Lynch holds court in many States, chiefly in 
the South, but wherever a few citizens can be induced 
to lay aside their brains and civilization for a few min- 
utes and elect him. His court room is the open air, the 
prosecuting attorney a masked mob-leader and his jury 
a rope. The method of ascertaining the guilt or inno- 
cence of the defendant is very simple. The defendant 
is hanged with the rope. If he hangs down he is guilty. 
If he hangs up he is innocent. Thus far no defendant 
has been found innocent — at least, not until long after 
the coroner's verdict. 

Judge Lynch hangs a hundred or more citizens each 
year. Generally he picks out detestable villains who 
deserve to die, but, sometimes, for amusement, he hangs 
horse thieves, chicken thieves and negroes who speak 
disrespectfully to white people. When the Judge gets 
tired of the rope he uses kerosene and fuel. After he 
has burned a poor shrieking villain, civilization in that 
vicinity goes down 100 degrees and remains there for a 
generation. 

Judge Lynch doesn't know any law, and doesn't care 
to. He can hang a man without law. In this he has 
a distinct advantage over an American court, which 
usually can't hang a man, even with the assistance of 



114 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

twenty law books weighing six pounds apiece. After 
Judge Lynch has looked on while a prosecuting attor- 
ney has spent five or six years trying to get a rapist 
or murderer into the penitentiary and has failed right 
along because the color of the whiskers of the man who 
made the paper on which the indictment was written was 
unconstitutional, he smiles a contemptuous smile and 
does the job in an hour. 

If Judge Lynch had more competition he wouldn't 
have so much business. If men were punished for their 
crimes in this inordinately free country he would soon 
be compelled to sell out below cost and go to Mexico or 
Central Africa. But as long as the technicality can 
bob up serenely in every trial and keep justice wait- 
ing like a freight train with a dead engine on a side 
track, reckless people will continue to speak with scorn 
of the ordinary judge and patronize the old scoundrel. 



LEADING CITIZENS 115 



COLONEL BOGIE 

COLONEL BOGIE has been one of the most promi- 
nent citizens of the British Isles for the past 
century and of late years has been very popular 
in the United States. 

The Colonel is very popular because so many people 
are anxious to meet him. However, he seems to have 
no particular fascination because when a man has met 
him his next desire is to get away from him. When a 
man has once met Colonel Bogie he isn't satisfied until 
he has proven to the world that he is better than the 
Colonel is. And from this time on they are deadly ene- 
mies. 

The Colonel inhabits the golf courses of the world 
and is singularly retiring in disposition. Many men of 
excellent character and high social standing spend 
years trying to meet him and never succeed. Nothing 
can be sadder than the sight of an eminent citizen in 
whiskers and khaki pants toiling profanely around a 
golf course one stroke behind the Colonel and swelling 
up into a purple balloon with conversation every time 
he messes up his approach. 

Yet the Colonel will be most approachable to a six- 
teen-year-old youngster with an old discarded driver 
and a few second-hand balls and will spend all summer 
in his company. People have strange tastes and none 
stranger than this mysterious gent. 

Colonel Bogie can be met any day during the season 
by the simple process of driving a golf ball around a 



ii6 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

nine-hole course in somewhere between thirty-nine and 
forty-five strokes. When this is done he becomes very 
friendly and can be approached time after time with 
very pleasant results. However, there are many men 
who prefer the club porch method of meeting the Colo- 
nel. By this method the golfist sits all afternoon in the 
shade of a tall sheltering high ball and talks about driv- 
ing the fourth hole in three and approaching 210 yards 
over a peach orchard. The Colonel is like other fa- 
mous men. Many of his most intimate friends have 
never really met him. 

The Colonel for so popular a man is singularly quiet. 
He never says anything at all. However, this is be- 
cause he seldom has a chance. His admirers do all the 
conversing while chasing him. 



POLITICAL PHENOMENA 

No feature of this country is so strange 
and interesting to the casual visitor from the 
haunts of nobility as our politics. No nation 
understands our politics, least of all the reck- 
less countries which have tried to run the 
complicated machinery of freedom without 
any talent for mechanics of that sort. 

Our politics has been severely criticized 
by Europeans for almost 150 years and up- 
wards of 100,000,000 of the said Europeans 
have moved over here in order to live com- 
fortably and happily while criticizing. 



POLITICAL PHENOMENA 119 



SENATORS 

A SENATOR is a very great man who has been 
able to get a State legislature by the neck and 
choke a $7,500 a year call from his country out 
of it. 

Senators are very keen of hearing and sometimes can 
detect their country's call when it isn't loud enough to 
be heard beyond a very small room in a hotel. But 
after they have gone to Washington to toil in the Capi- 
tol, they often get surprisingly deaf. You can call to 
a Senator for three years and make so much noise that 
the Statue of Columbia on top of the Capitol will keep 
her hands on her ears for months at a time, but your 
Senator will only report to the President that he has 
heard no evidence of disaffection in his State. Sena- 
torial work is terribly hard on the ears. 

Senators will henceforth be elected by popular bal- 
lot which will be a great improvement. It used to take 
some legislatures so long to elect two Senators every 
six years that they had no time left in which to consider 
the child labor question and the uniform divorce law. 

A Senator is supposed to act as a regulator for the 
House of Representatives. Each Senator has about 
four and a half Representatives to regulate and the job 
is evidently a very severe one for only fifteen of the 
present Senators have been able to hold it for more than 
ten years. 

When a Senator goes to Washington he becomes a 
very important personage and lives in the lap of lux- 



120 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

ury. The Government buys his office furniture and 
letter paper and soap and perfumery and tooth-brushes 
and bath towels and hair restorer, and when he leaves 
the Capitol at noon after a hard day's work, he finds 
some Captain of Industry waiting to take him down 
town in a gasoline chariot and buy him a cigar with a 
red, white and blue belt around it. All this is so com- 
fortable that most Senators are very much averse to 
change. They want to remain just as they are for- 
ever, but unfortunately the hardness of hearing which 
develops in Washington owing to its isolation from the 
home line of opinion compels most of them to retire 
from office by request after a few years. 

The Senate is a solemn deliberative body and is beau- 
tiful to watch. Senators are very courteous to each 
other except to those Senators who talk their way into 
the body. Talk is cheap and there is nothing cheap 
about the Senate. Take it all around the job is not 
what it once was. A plug hat and a pocket full of 
checks do not always cinch the election any more. A 
candidate has to show reasons why he should get in and 
then has to turn right around and show reasons why he 
shouldn't get out. Between these two a Senator some- 
times only has a chance to feel proud and lofty for 
about one week out of the fifty-two. 



POLITICAL PHENOMENA 121 



THE CONGRESSMAN 

THE Congressman is a representative of the 
plain people, and is employed by them as an er- 
rand boy in the national Capitol at Washington. 

There is only one Congressman for every 200,000 
people, and he is consequently very busy. Between 
packing up garden seeds for Bill Jones, pushing Ike 
Smith's pension through, trying to get a job in the 
census department for Orson Brown's daughter and 
towing old Sam Green around the city of Washington on 
a sight-seeing tour, he only has time to legislate about 
one hour a day. Some constituents treat their Con- 
gressman very cruelly, compelling him to carry their 
overcoats and pay for their cabs while in Washington, 
while others are more thoughtful, merely requesting 
them now and then to have Congress dig out a dry run 
on their farms and make a ship canal connecting with a 
horse pond, in order to help business during its con- 
struction. 

Congressmen are elected from districts some of which 
look like the ground plan of a dying rattlesnake. The 
job pays $7,500 and carfare to Australia each year, 
and is therefore very desirable. Most men start run- 
ning for Congress at twenty and land about thirty 
years later. When the newly elected Congressman ar- 
rives in Washington he is taken to the Speaker, who 
gives him a brass collar with a number on it, and he is 
then given a private room in a beautiful four-acre mar- 
ble office building which has hot and cold water and de- 
tectives in it. 



122 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

There are about fifty Congressmen and 350 occu- 
pants of seats in Congress. The former make the laws 
and the latter help explain them to the people back 
home. A Congressman is forbidden to spend more 
than $5,000 to get elected, but the law does not limit 
the amount which he can spend for board in Washing- 
ton. Congressmen are viewed by landladies in Wash- 
ington as a vested interest, and any law to prevent a 
Congressman from paying his entire quarterly check 
for hotel accommodations would be carried to the Su- 
preme Court as an attack on property rights. 

Congressmen frequently live to a great age — but 
not as Congressmen. The mortality among Congress- 
men is even greater than it is among Senators. The 
recent epidemic of November, 1912, swept almost 200 of 
them away. Congressmen survive by voting on the right 
side of popular measures, and those who succeed in 
guessing the right side give up magnificent careers as 
weather prophets and second sight mediums in order to 
do so. 



POLITICAL PHENOMENA 123 



THE PRESIDENT 

THE President of the United States is a good and 
wise man, who is elected by the people to give 
tone to politics in Washington. He is popu- 
larly supposed to run the country, too, but he doesn't. 
He merely looks over the train sheets. 

The President serves four years. Some of the most 
durable have served eight years. He gets $75,000 a 
year and lives in the White House, a large mansion, 
completely surrounded by newspaper reporters. He 
doesn't get his salary for living in the White House, but 
it is said to be worth the money. 

The President usually rises to his high office from ob- 
scurity, and goes back there promptly as soon as his 
term is over. Only native-born Americans can be 
President. This discourages immigrants so that they 
rarely go into politics. They go into business instead, 
and become aldermen. 

It is the duty of the President to veto all bills passed 
by the opposition, to see that the Cabinet chairs are 
freshly filled each morning, and to eat whatever is set 
before him, no matter how badly the banquet committee 
may have fallen down. He must fit a Pullman car 
berth neatly, must enjoy seeing his features warped all 
out of shape by cartoonists, and must give reporters 
and writers any desired details about his way of shaving 
or his brand of socks or the way in which he ties his 
shoes. The President is public property, and is never 
allowed to forget the fact. The public is very hard on 



124 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

Presidents too, just as it is on the rest of its property. 
Very few Presidents live very long, after their escape. 

The President works very hard and is worked even 
more heartlessly. In former days, executives were very 
poor house-cleaners, but nowadays the President who 
didn't clean up at least a department of government a 
week would be accused of incredible carelessness. The 
chief exercises of Presidents are shaking hands and of- 
fice seekers. Presidents are of various denominations. 
Some are Episcopalians, some Presbyterians and one 
or two have been thirty-cent pieces. Candidates for 
the presidency are chosen by influential politicians in a 
national yell Marathon held every four years. The 
candidate getting the longest yell is nominated. 

The Presidents have all been noble, honest men. They 
are even grander and nobler after death, for then even 
the opposition admits it. If a President works hard 
and makes good, he gets into the hall of fame, and has 
100,000 namesakes. Later on some of the namesakes 
are arrested for horse-stealing. There's nothing much 
in a name. 



POLITICAL PHENOMENA 125 



STANDPATTERS 

THE United States has a good many political par- 
ties but only two kinds of politicians: stand- 
patters and insurgents. 

A standpatter is a stationary statesman who is sat- 
isfied with majorities as they are. 

Standpatters have existed ever since Noah's time, 
when a large number of this great mariner's friends 
pronounced the forty days' rain to be only a slight lo- 
cal disturbance of no national bearing. Lot's wife was 
another eminent standpatter. She remained for cen- 
turies entirely motionless and looking steadfastly back- 
ward. 

The standpatter believes there is a future, but does 
not believe in trying to haul it into the present by the 
neck. Political standpatters are satisfied with last 
year's laws and social standpatters are satisfied with 
last year's shirts. There has also arisen a new brand 
of standpatters who are regarded with great contempt 
in some quarters because they are satisfied with last 
year's wife. 

Opinion varies as to the virtues of standpatters. 
We have the word of eminent statesmen to the effect 
that to stand pat is to rely upon the wisdom of the past, 
tempered with a firm tolerance of the present and a 
cautious survey of the future. We have the word of 
other statesmen to the effect that standpatism is a self- 
satisfied complacency merged with an intellectual timid- 
ity and surrounded by an impenetrable jungle of prece- 



126 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

dent, predestination, paternalism, pantheism, plutoc- 
racy and pooli-bah. The insurgent says that stand- 
patism is a fungus, jealous of a jackrabbit, because the 
latter can move ; a second-hand kedge anchor buried in 
the mud and waiting for the ship of state to come back 
and tie up to it ; a mournful and neglected hen setting 
on a china egg; a crawfish hole calling on the sun to re- 
volve around it because it refuses to budge. 

However, this is nothing to what the standpatter 
calls the insurgent. One standpatter recently alluded 
to insurgency as a merry-go-round racing with the hori- 
zon to the music of a steam calliope. 

A standpatter doesn't allude to the wheels of prog- 
ress, but to the obelisk of accomplishment. His fa- 
vorite hymn is " As it was in the beginning, is now and 
ever shall be," and his model is the wooden Indian which 
has done business for fifty years in America and which 
has never taken a step forward or made a single mis- 
take. 



POLITICAL PHENOMENA 127 



BOOMS 

A BOOM, according to the dictionary, is a num- 
ber of things among which is a loud noise. 
Some booms of this sort are produced by 
cannon, and are exceedingly hard on the ears. Others 
are produced by admiring friends, and are terribly de- 
bilitating to the pocketbook. America is the home of 
the complimentary boom. 

When a prominent citizen becomes afflicted with a 
boom, it must be given attention at once. A very small 
boom, the size of a man's hand on the inside sheet of a 
newspaper, may grow in a single week to an entire head- 
quarters with a campaign manager, a barrel and many 
other distressing complications. 

Booms are usually started by devoted friends for the 
purpose of making a man president, or senator, or Con- 
gressman, or legislator, or county clerk, or alderman, or 
poundmaster. A man w^ho is no horticulturist at all 
can go out in February and start a bumper crop 
of booms. Along in May or June, however, it takes a 
mighty skillful gardener to nurse the boom along and 
protect it from frost. Booms are very susceptible to 
frost and can detect it when nothing else can. A boom 
can lie down and freeze to death while its owner is going 
without a collar and gasping for breath in the fierce 
June sun. Even a chilly word will sometimes cause a 
boom, which has spread over several States, to curl up 
and die in a single night. 

The longest lived boom is the presidential boom. 



128 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

These prey upon the favorite sons of the various States 
and may last as long as twenty years, requiring a vast 
amount of fertilizing and trimming in the meantime. 
A presidential boom may be killed down to the roots in 
half a dozen conventions, only to shoot blithely forth 
two years later and bloom as if nothing had happened. 
Vice-presidential booms are of two sorts — those 
started with a view to interring some prominent man 
in the Vice-Presidency and those which attempt to hoist 
an unprominent man into the same position. Chas. 
W. Fairbanks and James S. Sherman were successfully 
entombed by the first method, but it backfired in the 
case of T. Roosevelt. By the latter method, social 
and political debts can be paid and it has now become 
the custom for a newspaper to mention a man for the 
Vice-presidency whenever he pays his subscription twa 
years in advance. 



POLITICAL PHENOMENA 129 



THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE 

THE Electoral College is one of our poorest insti- 
tutions of learning. It has no curriculum, no 
professors, no yell, and holds only one session 
every four years. It would take a genius to learn any- 
thing in the Electoral College, but it is very popular 
for all that, and thousands of men would feel highly 
honored if they had an Electoral College education. 

The Electoral College has a trifle over five hundred 
students, but they couldn't score a touch-down on a 
well-trained high-school team. They have no coach 
and do not even maintain a glee club. The College 
never had even a set of colors except in the campaign of 
1896, when it adopted gold. It is a very old school, 
having been organized in 1788 by the builders of the 
Constitution in an effort to remove the mental wear 
and tear of electing a president from the common peo- 
ple. The framers of the Constitution didn't have much 
faith in the taste of the common people as far as presi- 
dents went, and thought they were doing a pretty fine 
thing in letting the people elect the constables and legis- 
lators — an opinion in which a great many well- 
groomed gentlemen with automobiles still agree. But 
after the Congress had come within one vote of electing 
Aaron Burr president, the c. p. shivered slightly and 
took up the electing job themselves. 

Since that time the life of the presidential elector has 
been one of great ease. His work is light and requires 
no strain on the intellect. He is nominated because 



130 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 



of his age and respectability and is coached in his job 
by the voters in the November election. After his 
State has indicated its choice for President, it allows 
him to go to the State capital and cast its vote with a 
nice new lead pencil. Then he comes home and rests 
on his laurels until he dies, when the city newspapers 
give him two lines and recall the fact that he was once 
an elector. 

The Electoral College was invented because in the 
early days each State considered itself to be more im- 
portant than the nation and insisted on expressing its 
ideas as a State and not as a population. But since 
State lines have become so dim that only sheriffs and 
r'ailroads can tell where they are the College has become 
not only useless but a good deal of a nuisance and will 
probably be cleaned out and boarded up in the near fu- 
ture. 



POLITICAL PHENOMENA 131 



JUDGES 

THERE is very little majesty and awful omnipo- 
tence in the United States, and most of what 
there is is possessed by our judges. 

There is nothing about a baby to indicate that he 
will become a judge. When he becomes a youth other 
boys mingle with him freely, and sit on his head with 
the utmost cheerfulness and abandon. Even after he 
grows into manhood his future is concealed so carefully 
that people often slap him on the back and sometimes 
on the jaw as if he were only a common citizen. But 
suddenly, in the post meridian of his life, he becomes a 
judge and people look at the spot where he was a min- 
ute before as other people looked at the spot where Eli- 
jah stood when he flagged the fiery chariot. 

Some people claim that they can tell when a man is 
going to become a judge. But they do not do it by 
looking at his features. They happen to be well ac- 
quainted with some politician. 

After a man has become a judge he is a solemn and 
awful person with a perpetual headache caused by an 
overhanging brow. His duty is to sit behind a mahog- 
any pulpit in a court room and decide that because the 
murderer was indicted in words of two syllables, instead 
of the seven-syllable words which are legal tender in 
court rooms, he is not guilty and the murdered person 
isn't dead after all. It is also the duty of the judge 
to interpret the law and to preside as referee over rival 
attorneys and to instruct jurors, qx take the case away 



132 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

from them if they are not wise enough to decide it, and 
to furnish poHticians with something to worship. After 
a man becomes a judge he is a part of our great ju- 
diciary and can do no wrong. He may have been ap- 
pointed by a red-faced ward boss as a reward for steal- 
ing ballot boxes, but after he is appointed he is sacred 
and the person who disputes his decisions strikes a blow 
at the bulwarks of national freedom. 

We are allowed to criticise the President and the 
Twelve Apostles, but when we criticise a judge we are 
fined for contempt of court. Contempt of court is 
very costly. It would cost over $1,000,000 to buy 
enough contempt for some courts. 

There are four kinds of judges — good judges, bad 
judges, worse judges and ex-politicians. Some judges 
are appointed for life and only Heaven or a hostile 
party majority in Congress can remove them. The 
President is only a timid, unimportant individual who 
retires in a few years and can be sassed by anybody, 
but tornadoes and Hfe judges are not annoyed very 
much by onlookers. We do not have lese majeste in 
this country, but those men who have made a few brief 
remarks about the decisions of a federal judge and have 
worn out a felon's cell in consequence feel that in con- 
tempt of court we have a substitute which is giving 
equally good satisfaction. 



POLITICAL PHENOMENA 133 



THE VICE-PRESIDENT 

THE Vice-president is first gentleman in waiting 
to the President of the United States. He gets 
$12,000 a year and feed for his horse, which is 
not as much as he would get if he waited in a New York 
restaurant instead of in V^ashington, 

The Vice-president is elected by the people and be- 
comes President if the President dies. If the President 
lives the Vice-president dies — politically. And yet the 
government professes to disapprove of gambling. 

There have been twenty-seven Vice-presidents and 
seven of them have survived in history as Presidents. 
John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, 
John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Ches- 
ter A. Arthur and Theodore Roosevelt took a chance 
and won — though Tyler and Johnson would have been 
happier if they had lost. 

When elected, the Vice-president quits work and pre- 
sides over the United States Senate. He is merely a 
referee, however, and is not allowed to bang the mem- 
bers about as the Speaker of the House does. When 
his term expires the Vice-president retires to his home, 
after which he can be found in the encyclopsedia by a 
man with a good memory. There are now three living 
ex-Vice-presidents, which fact is not generally sus- 
pected. This also proves that Vice-presidenting is not 
as wearing on the constitution as Presidenting. A man 
can be Vice-president and still remain partially alive 
for forty years afterward. 



134 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

Vice-presidential candidates are chosen by national 
conventions as a relaxation after the exhausting labor 
of choosing Presidents. Sometimes a willing victim is 
found, but the job is usually wished on someone by a 
committee which meets in the grillroom of the leading 
hotel and draws a black bean out of a hat. To be a 
good Vice-president a man must have a name which har- 
monizes well with that of the Presidential nominee. He 
must be able to wear dignified clothes successfully, to 
shake hands fluently, sit for a handsome picture and re- 
main silent in seventeen languages for at least four 
years. He should have money, but should not object to 
parting with it. And he should also be in sufficiently 
good condition to keep for four years without the use 
of preservatives. 

Vice-presidents are ornamental but not useful, and we 
are constantly in danger of having them become Presi- 
dents. The Vice-president should be given $100,000 a 
year and two votes in the Senate. This would tempt 
full sized statesmen into the job and the country would 
not shudder so convulsively whenever the President 
catches a slight cold. 



CHIEF PRODUCTS 

The United States produces everything 
except kings, poetry and old masters in great 
abundance. Although only one-third of its 
area is cultivated and that in the most casual 
manner, no American women working in the 
fields, it is the richest country in the world. 
An ear of corn planted in the spring will feed 
a fat hog all winter; and one thousand dol- 
lars properly high-financed will feed a some- 
what thinner one for a lifetime. 



SIDE 

■ feel 



CHIEF PRODUCTS 137 



CORN 

CORN is called king in most of the United States, 
but this is saying a great deal too much for the 
King business. 
Kings are all right in their way, but no king has 
kept 30,000,000 people fat and happy by his own un- 
aided efforts, or has stuck to his job for twenty- four 
hours a day through a long, hot summer. When a king 
, dies his subjects drop a respectful tear and then send 
for the undertaker's wagon and a goldsmith to cut down 
I the crown to fit the next king. But when corn turns 
I yellow and black and gray and expires before the har- 
I vest, half a great nation mourns for a whole year and 
I refuses to buy new clothes, and cuts off its subscription 
[ to the local newspapers and votes against the adminis- 
I tration with great firmness and biliousness. 
* Com is raised as a food by millions of farmers, but 
is not absorbed directly by the American people in any 
I great quantities. It is used largely to upholster hogs 
I and cattle. A small red pig, if allowed to eat a crib of 
j corn, will produce enough ham and breakfast bacon to 
I keep a family fat and financially busted for three 
I months, and a thin cow with a backbone like the ridge- 
I pole of a cathedral, can so disguise herself by eating 
com for a few months that the packer will mistake her 
for a silver mine and sell her for thirty cents a pound. 
Corn is planted in the spring and grows like a 
small boy in a new suit of clothes. By July it is five 
feet high and going up faster than an English elevator, 



138 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

and by September each stalk is a young flag pole with 
four-foot leaves waving from it like banners. Rival 
States love to impress each other with the height of 
their cornstalks, but Illinois holds the record. A cen- 
tral Illinois farmer once tied his horse to a cornstalk 
on a hot July day, and when he came back he had to 
chase the horse up the stalk for two hours with climbing 
irons in order to untie him. 

In October the ears of corn are yellow and ripe and 
the farmer harvests them by stripping off the rough 
husks, yanking out the ear and tossing it into a wagon 
provided with a baseball backstop on one side. This 
is hard work and eventually develops a thumb like a 
horse file. An amateur can husk a bushel of corn be- 
fore getting measured for a new pair of hands, but an 
expert can husk 100 bushels a day in the field and over 
200 bushels a day in front of the village grocery store. 

Illinois produces over 375,000,000 bushels of corn a 
year and Iowa nearly as much. Corn sells for from 
sixty to eighty cents a bushel on the hoof. There are 
many forms of bliss, but none more poignant than to 
own 6,000 bushels of corn in the crib and to sit in front 
of the postoffice, whittling a pine stick and letting the 
price go up two cents a day. 



CHIEF PRODUCTS 139 



TOBACCO 

TOBACCO is a weed which is raised with great care 
and expense in the night-riding portions of the 
' United States and elsewhere, and is totally con- 
sumed by fire later on, there being no insurance. 

In fact, three-quarters of the arson in the world is 
committed upon tobacco. Every day a million dollars 
of tobacco goes up in smoke, and yet no effort is made 
to treat it with asbestos or to make it fireproof in any 
particular. Many substitutes for tobacco are often 
used, such as rope, cabbage^ excelsior, tar paper, jute 
bagging and twine, but unfortunately the substitutes 
bum as readily as the tobacco. 

In fact, this is even more unfortunate than the in- 
flammability of tobacco itself. 

Tobacco is grown in the warm sunshine and consists 
of large bunches of flat, broad leaves which absorb the 
said sunshine and convert it into nicotine, a deadly poi- 
son which is said to be able to kill a man at forty paces 
if it cared to. When the tobacco is ripe it is chopped 
off and dried in bundles, after which it is made into ci- 
gars, torches, fumigators, plug cut, cigarettes, snufF 
and other contagious articles. 

Tobacco was first used by the Indians and was discov- 
ered by Sir Walter Raleigh, who made seegars out of it 
and used them to divert his mind from his seasickness 
on his way back to England. When Sir Walter lighted 
up his first cigar in England and began blowing double 
rings of dense smoke through his mouth and nose and 



140 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

ears his servant threw a pail of water over him and 
called out the fire department. This method of break- 
ing the cigar habit is not in vogue to-day. 

Tobacco can be smoked, chewed, inhaled or eaten 
with equally distressing effects upon those who are not 
hardened to it. Most boys begin the use of tobacco at 
the age of ten and continue until their fathers discover 
the fact — after which they discontinue the custom un- 
til they are too large to tlijrash. Tobacco readily 
becomes a habit and fastens talons of steel upon its vic- 
tims, who will sometimes sell their vote or their ever- 
lasting friendship for a good cigar. 

There are many kinds of tobacco. Some kinds will 
remove the lining of the throat neatly in a few minutes, 
while other kinds cost a king's ransom and smoke like 
rarefied velvet. Some tobacco, when smoked, will at- 
tract the attention of the health department four blocks 
away, while other kinds when made into cigars sell for 
$1 apiece, and make kings contented with their jobs. 

The United States could save a million dollars a day 
by refraining from tobacco. This would be glorious if 
we could be convinced that the million would not be 
spent for gasoline or Cabaret dinners. 



CHIEF PRODUCTS 141 



THE HOG 

THE hog is a machine for the transforming of 
corn into money. He is also a refutation of 
the saying that in union there is strength. 
When a hog is united and in good running order he is a 
nuisance and a great expense. But when he has disin- 
tegrated and his fragments have been scattered from 
Maine to Cahfornia per refrigerator car he becomes a 
national asset and a source of wealth to which we point 
with pride if we are selling him, or which we view with 
I alarm if buying. 

! The hog when intact is an appetite equipped with 
i four legs and a squeal. This distinguishes him from 
, the great financier, who has to get along with two legs. 
' Men eat to live, but the hog eats to die. A man can 
1 eat enough to keep himself alive for seventy years, but 
4f a hog is industrious he can eat enough to die with 
great eclat and profit in eighteen months. 
j The hog has never been called handsome, even by a 
I post-impressionist. He has a large round body cov- 
jered with coarse bristles, short stout legs, small unin- 
1 spired eyes, ears which look like corn husks and a ridic- 
iulously inefficient tail. His face runs almost entirely to 
I nose, and for tearing up ground four long-nosed hogs 
iare equal to one Panama steam shovel. The rest of 
I the hog consists of mouth and digestion. This is the 
(secret of his great usefulness. With the aid of his di- 
igestion he turns corn into bank stock, farm land, auto- 
I mobiles and general prosperity. After a hog has con- 



142 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

sumed the contents of a com crib he stops being a hog 
and becomes bacon, ham, lard, pork chops, sausage, 
pickled pigs' feet and other luxuries, and can readily 
be traded for the common, hard-faced dollar which is 
so popular in all sections of society. 

Because of his wide acquaintance with mankind, the 
hog has no manners and spends his time trying to keep 
what he can't eat himself away from his friends. He 
lives a wild free life on the farm but dies with great sci- 
ence and enthusiasm in the great packing houses at the 
rate of fifteen miles an hour. Modern enterprise has 
utilized every part of the hog except his squeal and ar- 
rangements are now being made to reproduce these 
squeals by phonograph in order to perpetuate the re- 
marks of Wall Street during the passing of a tariff bill. 



CHIEF PRODUCTS 143 



PIE 

PIE is a solid shot fired at the stomach by the Pil- 
grim Fathers. Like all other ordnances, how- 
ever, it has greatly increased in deadliness by 
modern science. 

Pie originated in New England, but like most of New 
England, has gotten a long way from home. It is now 
found from Sawgatuck to Saguinay and from Knight's 
Key to Bellingham, Wash. It is composed of a Har- 
veyized shell filled with desiccated groceries, the whole 
roofed over with a manhole cover made out of dough. 
When the lid is clamped on, the pie is kiln dried until it 
will turn a fork point. It is then cut into wedge-shaped 
pieces and is eaten with avidity, and sometimes with a 
knife. Thus pie may be said to be the entering wedge 
of dyspepsia. (Fifteen minutes for recuperation 
here. ) 

There are many different kinds of pie, including the 
open faced, hunting case, jail window, frosted face and 
ventilated pie. There are also spoon pies, fork pies 
and finger pies. All pies, however, are similar in two 
respects. They have a bottom crust, corresponding to 
a concrete foundation and they are round. It is no 
more possible to make a square pie than it is to make a 
square barrel. A square pie would probably not ex- 
plode while baking, but it would not come out right 
when cut, and the eater would very likely become con- 
fused and choke to death on the unfamiliar angles. 

Of all pies, apple pie is perhaps the most popular. 



144 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

A sour apple pie alleviated with cloves and sugar and 
cream will produce more internal joy and exaltation 
than $10 worth of goose livers. Berry pies are also 
delicious, but fragile, and no man who has misplaced a 
berry pie during a picnic can ever forget it. The 
pumpkin is lowly and unloved until it is worked into 
pie, after which it becomes the theme of poets. Mince 
pie is a meat and fruit hash with an internal revenue 
flavor. Lemon and custard pies are noted for their del- 
icate construction, but are exceedingly handy as missiles 
in a pinch. Pies are also made out of vinegar, cheese, 
rhubarb, prunes, persimmons, pawpaws, grapes, chick- 
ens and oysters. A pie was once made of live black- 
birds in England, which is about as near as the English 
ever came to solving the pie problem, anyway. 

Pie is severely attacked by European critics and is 
also regarded with much suspicion in America. This is 
because pie is being made by too many rank amateurs, 
and is being eaten by too many enthusiasts. Four 
pieces of pie do not constitute a lunch, as many men 
fondly imagine, and a peck of miscellaneous material 
on a gutta percha foundation is not a pie, as too many 
housewives are prone to believe. Pies are like paint- 
ings — when they are good they are magnificent, but 
the world has no place for bad pies or bad paintings, 
either. 



CHIEF PRODUCTS 145 



SLANG 

ONE of the most enthusiastic of American indus- 
tries is the production of slang. 
Slang is home-made language, and is used 
largely by people who can't afford to use many store 
words. 

Real tailor-made English comes in large leather- 
bound dictionaries, and is very expensive. A couple 
of thousand of these words are about all the ordinary 
man can afford unless he works his way through college. 
But any man can hammer out enough words in his own 
home with the aid of a little imagination to give him- 
self a large and lurid vocabulary with weekly additions 
and revisions. Home-made words are now as numerous 
and as popular as the dictionary kind, and when a man 
who mixes up his own language meets a man who digs 
his out of the dictionary with the aid of a few pale, 
spectacled professors of English and style, the two 
have to talk to each other by signs. 

There are three kinds of slang. One kind is used to 
fill up gaps in the conversation. Some people use slang 
profusely in order to keep their tongues going while 
their brains are feverishly clutching for another idea. 

Another kind of slang is used by busy people who do 
not want to take the time to talk painfully around ev- 
ery grammatical corner. Sometimes one slang word 
will express perfectly an idea which would require a 
dozen costly imported English words to convey. It 
would take a formal talker half an hour using hundreds 



146 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

of large $3 words to explain politically, economically, 
and from a military standpoint what Theodore Roose- 
velt meant by " the big stick " ; and after he had ex- 
plained it, no one would understand it. 

A third kind of slang is used to fill up the gaps in tlie 
dictionary, and to give the language a chance to keep 
up with the imagination. Word pictures can be 
painted out of the dictionary, but sometimes a slang 
word is a cartoon all in itself. 

When slang words are necessary, they are discovered 
after many years by the philologists and are received 
into full communion in the English language. When 
slang words are bad, they go on the stage. 

Very few men are so wise that they don't need slang 
at one time or another. And very few are so foolish 
that they will not use it when necessary. 



CHIEF PRODUCTS 147 



THE OFFICE SEEKER 

AFTER the American people have toiled six 
months on their quadrennial elections their out- 
put consists of one President and 200,000 of- 
fice seekers. 

An office seeker is a man who spends his life hunting 
for a good substitute for work. He can't afford to loaf 
and he cannot bear to toil. What he desires with all 
his soul is to rest, at a good salary, from the trials of 
a political campaign for the rest of his life. 

-Most office hunters begin hunting immediately after 

I the November election, in which they took a very promi- 

I nent part, and practically elected the President. They 

I begin by asking for an ambassadorship and descend by 

I slow degrees to a job in the census bureau. After an 

( office seeker becomes chronic he doesn't care much what 

kind of an office he gets. All he desires is to hop 

aboard the great government machine and ride blithely 

from payday to payday, even if he has to ride the 

bumpers. 

And yet an office seeker is not really as lazy as he 
thinks he is. He will toil night and day for months, 
marching hundreds of miles by the light of a tin torch 
and polling his ward with the utmost fidelity every ten 
minutes for the privilege of marching up to the in- 
cumbent in office and saying, " It was a hard pull, but 
'we elected you " — and then of asking him in a hoarse 
whisper if he has a fourth assistant deputyship of any 
kind lying around. 



148 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

An office seeker is the most relentless species of hu- 
manity. An Indian on the trail is trifling and unin- 
teresting compared with him. An office seeker will fol- 
low a President over four mountain ranges, through 
100 miles of swamps and through 987 miles of hotel 
corridors without once losing the scent. He will meet 
him at sunrise as he steals forth for a mouthful of un- 
tainted air and at midnight as the President steals down 
to the coal cellar to bank the furnace the office seeker 
will arise from behind the ash pile and show him his en- 
dorsements for the post of substitute doorkeeper at the 
Panama Canal. Office seekers worried William Henry 
Harrison to death and after he had died many of them 
led better lives in the hope of meeting him later and 
pressing their claims in a better land. 

After a man has sought office for a while he isn't good 
for anything else and after he has gotten the office he 
isn't good for anything else either. Many an office 
seeker, after spending enough energy and genius to 
build a 1,000 mile railroad, has obtained a $1500 a year 
office and has thereafter sat firmly through his life 
with his feet on the desk and a sign on the door telling 
opportunity to call again. 



EXCLUSIVE FEATURES 

Every nation has its exclusive features. 
Some of them run mostly to ruins and others 
to scenery and restaurants. The United 
States has many novelties which cause the im- 
ported guest to gasp with interest among 
which are the following: 

The Quick Lunch Counter 

Greek Letter Societies 

Broadway 

The Baseball Fan 

The Star Spangled Banner 

The Glorious Fourth 

Elevators 

College Spirit 

Country Clubs 

The Ham Sandwich 

Skyscrapers 



EXCLUSIVE FEATURES 151 



THE QUICK LUNCH COUNTER 

IN the United States time is very valuable, because 
we have only had 135 years of it, while European 
nations have succeeded in using up more than 
1,000 years apiece without getting anywhere in par- 
ticular. In our 135 years, we have had to eradicate 
Indians, buffaloes, and rattlesnakes from 3,000,000 
square miles of territory ; build houses equipped with 
steam heat and pianos for upwards of 100,000,000 
people ; construct 200,000 miles of railroads ; build 200,- 
000 churches and 10,000 libraries ; turn two million 
I square miles of forest and prairie into cornfields and po- 
I tato patches and bring 10,000 baseball teams to their 
' present state of perfection. Because he has been busy 
i at all these tasks, the American citizen has not had 
, much time to waste on lunch. This accounts for the 
1 quick lunch counter, an invention by which a man is 
I able to engulf four varieties of food and a toothpick in 
; less time than it takes to flag a waiter in a European 
restaurant. 

The quick lunch counter is as big a time saver as the 
telephone, the automobile, the packing house and the 
lynching bee. With its aid, a man can lower enough 
food into his digestive system in two minutes to keep it 
busy until evening and perhaps all night. It has come 
into a panting and breathless nation as a long sought- 
f or boon and only the loiterer and the dilettante now sit 
down in a chair and put napkins on their vests before 
eating two-in-the-water-easy on a raft, with a draw one, 
and a stack of wheats on the side. 



152 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

The lunch counter is manned by a crew of deft jug- 
glers who can deal sandwiches right and left handed and 
cut a plate of pork and beans from under the deck 
without spilling so much as a bean. Judiciously con- 
cealed by a partition, a sad eyed cook prepares five or- 
ders at once on a gasoline stove. In a gold plated 
restaurant, a chef will take half an hour to prepare an 
order, and then get half of it wrong, but no one makes 
mistakes in a lightning lunchery. Time is money at 
noon, if not at night, and the cook who murdered one 
and a half minutes of $10 an hour time wouldn't last 
long enough in a fast foodery to walk out by himself. 

The lunch counter man makes his patron sit on high 
stools, so they will go away quicker and give someone 
else a chance. He can prepare a full meal in two min- 
utes and three minutes later another man will be order- 
ing from the same stool, while the waiter is hurling the 
ironstone dishes used in the last meal at the washer 
twenty feet away. Marvelous feats are performed by 
lunch counter patrons, some of whom are able to eat 
half a pie in thirty seconds with the aid of a knife alone. 
Men who eat rich dinners, lasting from 8 to 11 o'clock 
p. M., and women who live on chocolate candy look 
upon the lunch counter with horror. However, it is a 
great blessing to the business man. It gives him indi- 
gestion, spots in the eyes and blind staggers and com- 
pels him to retire from business and take up the study 
of civihzation at the age of forty-five. 



EXCLUSIVE FEATURES 153 



GREEK LETTER SOCIETIES 

THE Greek Letter Society was invented over 100 
years ago in an American college and there are 
now so many of them that the Greek Alphabet is 
becoming sadly overworked and must soon be enlarged 
to take care of the rush of business. 

A Greek Letter Society is commonly supposed to be 
a gang of desperate young men who have sworn over 
a bloody skull to stand firmly by each other and never 
to reveal the name of the brother who blew up the court- 
house. It is supposed to be so powerful that when 
twenty or thirty young men with pompadour hats get 
together in a black cellar under a red light and whisper 
in case-hardened voices they can defeat the noble young 
candidate for Congress who is supported only by a few 
shivering magnates or a plucky little railroad. 

Greek Letter Societies are also supposed to lead 
lives of crime and to encourage their devotees to engulf 
large vats of virulent stimulants. Many a bright 
young man who has gone to college with a pocket full of 
picture cards for perfect attendance at Sunday School 
is supposed to have emerged from the first meeting of 
his secret society with a fierce yearning for hasheesh 
and the blood of tender young children. 

All of these suspicions arise from the fact that the 
Greek Letter Society is secret and that its members are 
supposed never, no never, to reveal what has happened 
behind the black curtain with the cross-bones on it. 
Anything secret is suspicious, as John D. Rockefeller 



154 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

has found out. But at the risk of invoking the horrid 
vengeance of the Alfalfa Delts, the Delta Kappa Son- 
ofaguns, the Eta Bita Pies, the Sigh Whooperups, the 
Mu Kow Moos and the Omega Salves we are about to 
divulge the four principal secrets of the Greek Letter 
Society. 

Turn down the lights, please. 

They are as follows : 

1. The rent of the chapter house is now two months 
overdue and to-morrow the high priest of the Delta 
Flush chapter is going to try to jolly the landlord along 
another month. 

S. If a certain tow-headed freshman is made presi- 
dent of his class he can be snagged away from the other 
frats and into our noble order. Vote, Brothers, vote. 

3. On the third of next month an informal dance will 
be given with an imported orchestra and when the Fli 
Gammas hear of it they will expire with envy. 

4. On next Saturday night at midnight three shud- 
dering neophites will be inducted into the awful mys- 
teries of our mighty band. Let no brother forget to 
bring a barrel stave. 

There are a few other dark secrets but none as black 
as these. 

Greek Letter Societies are harmless and moreover 
are of great good. Many a collegian has, through 
them, learned the Greek alphabet so thoroughly that 
he has remembered it long after French and Trigonom- 
etry have cantered through and out of his memory. 



EXCLUSIVE FEATURES 155 



BROADWAY 

BROADWAY, the heart of New York, and the 
lungs of the theater business, is the best adver- 
tised street in the world. It is called Broad- 
way, because it has no relation whatever to the straight 
and narrow path. 

Broadway was originally a crooked and uncertain 
trail made by the Indians while returning from New 
Amsterdam with their week's supply of firewater. It 
is still crooked in spots, but there is nothing uncertain 
about it. As New York has grown, it has been ex- 
tended to take care of the Rush of business, until it is 
now twenty miles long and two stories deep most of the 
way. It begins at the Battery, where the immigrants 
land, and where every language except English is 
spoken fluently. A mile north, it becomes the lair of 
the multimillionaire, and another mile north, its stores 
sell everything from tango costumes to pet alligators. 
Farther north, it leaps to a height of 800 feet, and 
then sinks to a desert of one-story shops with a twenty- 
seven-story hotel among them. It then suffers from a 
convulsion of theaters, recovers only to be captured by 
the automobile business, and still further north runs 
majestically for miles between tall, beetling cliffs of 
apartment houses. Fifteen miles from its source, it 
becomes the principal thoroughfare of Yonkers, being 
the only street to do duty for two large cities. It then 
rambles over the hills of the Hudson, between the es- 
tates of the impossibly rich, and is last seen headed for 



156 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

Albany under a thick cloud of dust and automobile 
smoke. 

Broadway contains the largest hotel in the world, 
for this year only, and its tallest building. The largest 
apartment house, the thinnest skyscraper, the most ter- 
rific restaurant and the most interesting church are 
all upon Broadway. It assays more millionaires, act- 
ors, automobile salesmen and gunmen than any other 
thoroughfare. It goes to bed at 8 p. m. at its lower 
end and wakens for the evening at the same hour, at 
42nd street. It has more hotels, theaters, electric signs 
and dejected little parks than any other street. There 
is standing room only on its sidewalks and twice as 
many people travel underneath it. 

Broadway is America in one reel. The immigrant 
lands at its lower end, pack on his back, sells sandwiches 
for the first mile, goes into business in the second mile, 
runs the city government in the next mile, and proceeds 
dizzily from the business section through the restaurant 
area and the automobile dispensaries, to the apartment 
house wilderness, and thence to a country estate on the 
Hudson at the far upper end. 

Broadway is a twenty-mile leap from poverty to 
riches, with plenty of falling off places by the way. It 
will be longer some day, but never much more terrific. 



EXCLUSIVE FEATURES 157 



THE BASEBALL FAN 

ONE of the strange and terrifying phenomena of 
the United States is the baseball fan. 
The baseball fan consists of two men occupy- 
ing the same suit of clothes. In the morning the fan 
f is anything from a minister to a quiet, respectable mil- 
lionaire, with his mind cluttered up with bond issues. 
, You cannot tell a baseball fan from a rational being 
at breakfast unless his wife allows him to read the morn- 
. ing paper at the table. But in the afternoon the fan 
j ejects the other occupant from his clothes and takes 
i them out to the baseball park where he affixes them 
I firmly to the soft side of a pitch pine plank in the 
i bleachers, and convulses, erupts, detonates, steam sirens 
I and explodes until the simoons and tornadoes of sound 
I make business difficult a quarter of a mile away. Cas- 
\ ual visitors to this land from England and other rest 
cures look with alarm at the sight of a bank president 
tearing off his collar, dancing on his hat and pleading 
for a small bite out of the umpire, and these visitors re- 
turn home with grave doubts as to the stability of our 
government. But the custom of segregating our peri- 
odical lunatics at baseball games has made this country 
safe and sane for at least 2S hours a day. If England 
could get its suffragettes interested in baseball, she 
would escape one of her worst troubles. 

The real baseball fan flourishes only on the bleachers 
and soon wilts and loses his voice when confined in a 
box. When the sun is 100 in the shade, and the home 



158 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

team is two runs ahead, he doesn't care who is running 
for President. What he is interested in is the man who 
is running for third. A home run means more to him 
than a stock dividend and when the team drops four 
in a row, even a new baby at home can't console him. 

An easy way to detect a baseball fan this year while 
he is at large, is to approach him and enter into a dis- 
cussion of politics. If he answers you in batting av- 
erages, you may feel safe in asking him if the police are 
tight about pop bottles and cushions in his town. 



EXCLUSIVE FEATURES 159 



THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER 

THE Star-Spangled Banner " is our national 
song. It is a beautiful piece with the following 
words : " Oh — oh, say, can you see, by the 
dawn's early light, turn- turn- turn, tum-tum-tum, tum- 
tum-tum, tum-tum turn, turn," etc. 

Some people use words in place of the " turns," but 
this is not customary and is regarded as an offensive 
display of knowledge. 

" The Star-Spangled Banner " was written by Fran- 
cis Scott Key, a Baltimore lawyer who was a prisoner 
on board a British war vessel during the bombardment 
of Fort McHenry in 1814. When the morning came 
and Mr. Key discovered that the American flag was 
still there he seized an envelope and wrote on its back 
the sublime words which, we are told, make up the poem. 
These were afterwards set to music by one of our earli- 
est aviators who reached an altitude of high K above C 
i in the closing bar of the song. 

" The Star-Spangled Banner " became instantly pop- 
ular, and has always awakened the greatest enthusi- 
asm. It is a splendid piece to listen to when it is 
played by a band, but when sung the effect is marred 
by the crashing of masculine voices which have blown 
out a cylinder head on the high notes. The song has 
encouraged patriotism in America, but is undoubtedly 
accountable for our backwardness in music. After the 
average American citizen has splintered his vocal 
equipment on " the land of the free " a few times 



i6o SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

he becomes discouraged and declines to Caruso any 
more. 

However, " The Star-Spangled Banner " is our great- 
est national song and should be sung on all official oc- 
casions. If the government will appoint official tenors 
to take the high note either at an annual salary or by 
piece work, all trouble will be averted in the future. 

It is customary for all patriots to rise when this 
piece is being played. This is a fine tribute to our na- 
tion, but is marred by the fact that it is played not 
only at patriotic gatherings but at prize fights, dog and 
pony shows, vaudeville performances and horse races. 
Many a fine old lady has struggled to her feet during a 
vaudeville show while a poodle dog has walked across a 
tight wire carrying an American flag in his mouth to 
the tune of " The Star-Spangled Banner " and she has 
glared reproachfully at the sodden souls beside her who 
have declined to bite. 

We should be so proud of the " Star-Spangled Ban- 
ner " that we should not only learn the words and jump 
at the tune but should pass a law forbidding it to be 
played as a means of hoisting an audience to its feet 
while a Greek strong man is holding up an old muzzle- 
loading cannon with his teeth. 



EXCLUSIVE FEATURES 161 



THE GLORIOUS FOURTH 

THE Glorious Fourth is the national cataclysm 
of America. It is the nearest approach to 
South American insurrection or an Hungarian 
parliament or a Mexican election that exists in this 
country. It is more fatal than any of these but is not 
as debilitating as deer hunting or toadstool eating or 
crossing Michigan avenue after 11 o'clock at night. 

The Fourth of July is the longest day in the year, 
the almanac to the contrary notwithstanding. It be- 
gins at 4 p. M. on the day before and continues until 
the ammunition is exhausted. It is also the only audi- 
ble day in the calendar. You can see Christmas, you 
can taste Thanksgiving and under favorable circum^- 
stances you can feel St. Patrick's Day. But the 
Fourth of July is made to be heard like campaign ora- 
tory. It sounds like a cross between battleship prac- 
tice and a gambler's war back of a police station in 
Chicago. 

The Fourth of July was invented to celebrate the 
Declaration of Independence. It was first observed by 
ringing bells. However, the new-born nation after- 
wards went out and shot up the British for five years 
i after which bells seemed a little tame. At this point the 
Chinese firecracker, a tabloid noise put up in sanitary 
packages and sold by all grocers, was introduced and 
has given general satisfaction ever since. 

The Fourth is the storm center of patriotism, youth- 
ful deviltry, and burned fingers. It is paradise for the 



i62 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

small boy, purgatory for the old maid and hades for the 
yellow dog with a long, convenient tail. It is also the 
safety valve of a great many restless young American 
men who would burst if they had to go through life 
without shooting off a revolver now and then. 

Cynical people say there is no use of celebrating the 
Fourth any more because we are no longer independent. 
But our ancestors had to fight for independence after 
they celebrated the first time. After we celebrate the 
Fourth, therefore, we should go out and fight for inde- 
pendence by hitting a trust below the eye. 

Nervous people who go down cellar when it thunders 
insist that the Fourth should be celebrated without pow- 
der, evidently mistaking it for St. Valentine's Day. 

If the inventors of the Fourth of July had been as 
afraid of powder as some of their descendants are we 
would still be saving our firecrackers for the King's 
birthday. 

But if they had been as wasteful of their powder or 
as reckless with it as we are on the Fourth we might 
still be going to the postoffice to get a pound of tea. 

We should observe the Fourth with moderation and 
caution but none of us should be too proud or too con- 
servative to contribute a blistered thumb to the cause 
of liberty on this great day. 



EXCLUSIVE FEATURES 163 



ELEVATORS 

AN elevator is a sort of passenger skyrocket by 
which a person can be yanked off the earth and 
into a cooler climate forty-nine stories above in 
less time than it would take him to climb three flights of 
stairs and mop his forehead twice. 

The elevator was invented in America, which also pro- 
duced the quick lunch counter, the revolver, and other 
time savers and it has enabled man to colonize the air. 
Half a century ago nobody lived more than seventy feet 
above the ground. Nowadays men do business happily 
700 feet aloft and discharge their office boys for steal- 
ing eagles' eggs off of the fire escapes instead of attend- 
ing to business. 

Some elevators travel SOO feet a minute, making 
stops at all way stations, while others run express to 
the three dozenth floor at the rate of 600 feet a min- 
ute, the passenger's vital organs following slightly be- 
hind. Ry taking a local up four floors and catching an 
express down to the city proper, a hurried financier can 
leave his oflSce in the sunshine, slide down through a 
thunder storm and borrow an umbrella from a friend on 
the sidewalk in less than a minute's time. 

Elevators are run by men and boys, who are kept so 
busy that they do not have time to take tips. This ac- 
counts for the enormous popularity of this ingenious 
contrivance in this country. 

Elevators occasionally fall, but not as often as aero- 
planes or brick houses.. They are not as dangerous as 



i64 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

street cars or instantaneous water heaters, and nobody 
minds them in this country. However, they are re- 
garded with great terror in Europe, and are only used 
as a last resort. An Englishman runs an elevator as if 
he were moving a barn and only the leisure class has 
time to ride in them. 

Elevators have increased the joy of the American 
business man by taking him above the fly line, the dust 
line, the noise line, the book agent line, and the skyline. 
They are almost the only free thing left in America. 
The New Yorker who hasn't the price of a ticket to 
Coney Island need never despair so long as he can climb 
on an elevator and travel so high in two minutes that he 
can see half way back to his old western home. 



EXCLUSIVE FEATURES 165 



COLLEGE SPIRIT 

COLLEGE spirit is a harmless form of temporary 
insanity which is found on the leading campuses 
of our country. It cannot be bought in bottles 
like other well known spirits, but its effects are about 
the same. 

College spirit is composed of enthusiasm, unconven- 
tionality and lungs in equal parts with a pinch of brains 
for seasoning. It is not used much in the class rooms 
but is a grand thing for the campus. A campus by it- 
self is about as exciting as any other forty-acre field. 
But after a campus has been soaked in college spirit 
for a century or two, it becomes so exciting that a young 
man can hardly walk across it without taking a large 
bite out of his hat and giving ninety-nine Rahs for the 
school. 

Without college spirit a student would study all 
night for four years and graduate at the head of his 
class with a caved-in chest and nervous insurrection of 
the stomach. But with a few doses of this celebrated 
elixir of Hfe and thoroughly guaranteed monotony cure, 
the same student will hang a purple hat on his left ear, 
buy a suit of clothes designed by a cubist and sing with 
his friends in the street cars until the police gather him 
up for safe keeping; he will put on padded pants and 
a jersey, grab a football and attempt to bore his way 
through a man four sizes larger than he is, getting a 
broken leg with great thankfulness. He will insert 
himself into a revolving mass of maddened sophomores 



i66 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

and go home in a barrel carrying one ear proudly in his 
hand. He will work all night in the snow, contracting 
pneumonia and a sprained back while coaxing a reluc- 
tant cow who has no college spirit to crawl through a 
small window into the office of the college president. 

Because of all these things some people laugh at col- 
lege spirit and think that its possessors should be treated 
by our leading alienists. But boys who have college 
spirit seldom get over it, and when they tackle life later 
on, they tackle it low and hard and only grin when trou- 
ble kicks them in the slats. 



EXCLUSIVE FEATURES 167 



COUNTRY CLUBS 

A COUNTRY club is an American institution in- 
vented for the purpose of letting city people 
get out into the country without bothering the 
farmers. 

Country clubs are built for lovers of nature and con- 
tain all sorts of conveniences for enabling them to soak 
themselves in bucolic bliss including grill rooms, bars, 
golf courses, piano players and table d'hote dinners. 
With the aid of these and other comforts a man can sit 
in the rathskellar of a country club and drink in the 
pure fresh air and other things until the last car leaves 
for the city. People who have had a long course in 
country clubs become so familiar with the joyous life 
of the rural districts that they can tell the difference 
between the turkey trot and Tango dances by ear and 
distinguish a bull frog from a bull calf with the skill 
of an old agriculturalist. 

Country club members are divided roughly into two 
classes — those who sow golf balls on the hillsides and 
those who sow wild oats in the grill room. These crops 
are not noticed in the agricultural reports but they 
are quite extensive nevertheless. The man who sows 
$197 worth of golf balls in a 180-acre meadow, har- 
vests a pair of brown forearms in the gentle autumn, 
and the man who gives his earnest and undivided atten- 
tion to the untamed oats crops, harvests the usual re- 
sults but in a more stylish and exclusive manner, draw- 
ing a large and fashionable audience when the judge 
grants the decree. 



i68 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

Since the automobile has become prevalent country 
clubs have increased enormously in numbers and the 
town which does not now possess one is looked upon with 
scorn, even by rural communities. To enjoy nature 
in a country club a member should not put on overalls 
and a straw hat as large as a city voting precinct. To 
do so would excite as much unfavorable comment as if 
he were to be caught milking a cow. White flannel 
suits and Paris clothes together with a haughty and de- 
tached air eked out when necessary with a monocle and 
lorgnette, secure the best results in these delightful 
rural retreats and a long line of well selected ancestors 
count for more on the country club circuit than the 
unporterhoused cattle on a thousand hills. 



EXCLUSIVE FEATURES 169 



THE HAM SANDWICH 

THE ham sandwich is the great American substi- 
tute for food. 
A ham sandwich consists of a hinged bun with 
a suspicion of ham between halves. Modern science 
has now made it possible to slice ham so thin that one 
pig can upholster 5,000 ham sandwiches. 

When eaten the ham is liberally smeared with mus- 
tard. Thus the eater imagines that he could taste the 
ham if it were not for the mustard and is perfectly 
happy. A new sandwich is now being tested in which 
the ham is painted on the inside of the bun, and it is 
giving very satisfactory results. 

The ham sandwich is the mainstay of the American 
traveler. It forms the principal bill of fare at all rail- 
road lunch counters. A railroad lunch counter may 
have hard boiled eggs and kiln dried chicken legs and 
other delicacies but after the hungry traveler has 
looked over the assortment he generally resorts to the 
sandwich. 

One ham sandwich will keep the ordinary traveler 
from wanting any more food for 100 miles. This 
brings down the cost of traveling in a remarkable man- 
ner. Men and women have been known to travel for a 
week at a time existing entirely on ham sandwiches and 
a peculiar brown drink also found at railroad lunch 
counters and resembling coffee in price and its manner 
of application. 

The ham sandwich is legal tender for a nickel in all 



170 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

parts of the country except along a few railroads so lost 
to honor as to charge ten cents apiece for everything it 
sells to the traveler. When a railroad charges ten 
cents for the ordinary ham sandwich of commerce it 
can be viewed with suspicion. It is conducted for aris- 
tocrats and the common man stands no show with it. 



EXCLUSIVE FEATURES 171 



SKYSCRAPERS 

SKYSCRAPERS are indigenous to the American 
zenith and are found nowhere else. They are re- 
garded with great contempt in Europe, because 
they are inartistic like presidents and captains of in- 
dustry. But there is a suspicion that Europe scorns 
all these useful articles, principally because America 
thought of them first. 

The skyscraper was invented in Chicago about 
twenty-five years ago. It was discovered that by con- 
structing a 20-story steel skeleton, sticking two or three 
stories into the ground, and draping the rest with an 
overskirt of brick, stone or terra cotta, a very useful 
building could be produced. The first great sky- 
scraper was the Masonic Temple in Chicago. It is SI 
stories high and w^as once the wonder of the world. 
Nowadays, New Yorkers frequently stumble over it 
while looking for really tall buildings. 

Skyscrapers are now built in one, two, three, four 
and five dozen story sizes. In New York, the first three 
sizes are out of style, and are being torn down to make 
room for really high buildings. The tallest skyscraper 
in the world was once the Metropolitan building in New 
York, 700 feet high, but last year it was the Woolworth 
building, with 50 stories, and a 60-story building is al- 
ready being planned, while the city is also threatened 
with a 100-story building from the top of which the 
Goddess of Liberty will look like a shop girl on a dry- 
goods box. 



172 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

Skyscrapers are made possible by the rapid elevator 
which is another American invention. The elevator 
hoists the occupant at the rate of 600 feet a minute, 
leaving his liver and other internals to follow slightly 
later. Europeans are more afraid of our fast elevators 
than they are of our fourteen-inch breech loaders, but 
they are quite safe. 

Skyscrapers are also earth stabbers. Some of them 
reach 100 feet below the surface, and are useful most of 
the way down. There is no telling how much higher 
they will grow, but we may expect some day to see a 
doctor on the 19th floor, recommending a patient to 
an office on the 137th floor, where the climate is cooler 
and more salubrious. 

Skyscrapers are not always beautiful to look at, but 
they are magnificent to look out of. Europeans who 
spend their days gazing from the second story of a 
beautiful building into the rear brick wall of another 
beautiful building will learn something to their advan- 
tage by taking a 45th floor office and soaking their 
souls in scenery as they open their morning's mail. It 
is like doing business on a steam-heated mountain top. 



FADS 

This nation has more fads than most coun- 
tries because of the great ease with which the 
American gets interested in something new. 
Among the many permanent enthusiasms 
of Americans only a few can be mentioned 
here. 



1 



FADS 175 



BATH TUBS 

THERE are more bath tubs in the United States 
than there are spectacles in Germany or barons 
in Italy. 

The bath tub is the chief landmark of civilization. 
Wherever it can be found in profusion there civilization 
reigns and the man has a strangle hold on the culture of 
the day. A land may be full of wondrous marble pal- 
aces and temples which make the Congressional library 
look like an overgrown dog house, but if it has no bath 
tubs it is a failure and missionaries flock to it in great 
numbers. 

In England the bath tub is the millstone of the civi- 
lized man. He does not wear it around his neck, but 
he folds it up and lugs it painfully around the world in 
his baggage. The bath tub has made great strides in 
England, but is still a curiosity in many hotels. If we 
peruse English literature the chief thing which we learn 
is the fact that the upper class Englishman cannot live 
without his morning bath. But if we peruse England 
from a humbler standpoint we also discover that he ap- 
parently does the bathing for the entire island. 

In America the bath tub has made great strides, and 
is now more common than the piano and the mail order 
catalogue. The bath tub is the first rung of the lad- 
der by which the American rises to prosperity. After 
having acquired a bath room he buys a piano on the 
installment plan. Then he joins a club and swarms 
gallantly upward into the automobile class. The bath 



176 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

tubs of America keep the nation clean at a very small 
expense. For two cents a day an American can soak 
himself for half an hour each morning and can play the 
fascinating game known as chasing the soap. How- 
ever, if he goes to the American hotel he discovers that 
baths are much higher in price. It costs him a dollar 
extra to rent a room with bath, and many travelers 
have been so irritated by this that they have gone out 
and stood in the dusty automobile road for an hour each 
afternoon in order to get their money's worth when they 
return to the hotel. 

It is now the ambition of the American citizen to own 
as many bath tubs as possible and the magnate who has 
just built a house in which there are fifty-seven bath 
tubs for the use of himself, wife and little son is gazed 
upon with awe and admiration on all sides. 



FADS 177 



ANCESTORS 

ANCESTORS are found along with old furniture 
and captive skeletons in all of our best American 
families. Ancestors consist of forefathers and 
foremothers, to say nothing of foreuncles and aunts, 
who have done something grand or noble, like being be- 
headed by a king or having a relative who was governor 
of a colony. This enables them to be pointed at with 
pride by their descendants forever more. 

Being an ancestor is one of the easiest and most at- 
tractive of jobs. It merely consists of being boosted 
by one's descendants. Thus, many ancestors have been 
enabled to make good after they are dead. More than 
one ancestor who has gone out of this life a poor per- 
son, and only a few jumps ahead of the sheriff, has had 
the good fortune, a century later, to become the ances- 
tor of some ambitious family with plenty of money, and 
has become so famous in consequence that his tomb- 
stone has had to be greatly enlarged and improved. 

Ancestors are one of the most valuable and satisfac- 
tory of possessions. They are non-taxable and cannot 
be stolen. Their upkeep is practically nothing, and 
they do not deteriorate with age or neglect. In fact, 
they increase in value as they grow older. An ancestor 
600 years old is worth a whole mass meeting of fifty- 
year-old ancestors. Adam is the oldest ancestor. He 
is 6,000 years old, and had a fine record. But he is a 
common possession, like education and liberty, so he is 
not valued very highly. 



178 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

Almost all rich people own and operate ancestors. 
But the poorest man may have them, too. Many a man 
who hasn't two vests to his name, and cannot hold a 
job two minutes, has ancestors which are the envy of his 
automobihous neighbors. We cannot buy ancestors, if 
we do not have them, but we can buy them for our chil- 
dren by marrying discreetly. A full set of fine im- 
ported ancestors can now be purchased for a million 
dollars. The great trouble with these imported goods 
is the fact that they are often badly infested with de- 
scendants. Some of the very finest ancestors have been 
almost ruined by these parasites and there is no legal 
cure. 

In England, everybody has ancestors. Some of them 
are over 1,000 years old, and are still in a state of ex- 
cellent preservation. The best American brand came 
over in the Mayflower about 300 years ago. Most of 
the better grades of American ancestors are now con- 
trolled by a trust, the Daughters of the Revolution. 

We should all be proud of our ancestors, but not out 
loud. 



FADS 179 



POPULATION 

POPULATION is the chief end of American cities. 
Population consists solel}^ and entirely of peo- 
ple. American cities collect people as misers col- 
lect dollars. 

All dollars look alike to misers, and all people look 
alike to the city which is panting to cross the 100,000 
mark in the next census. 

If a city can collect enough crippled, anaemic, under- 
fed and unwashed babies together, with the nondescript 
parents of the same, to boost its population figures 
5,000, it is pleased and proud as if it was doing some- 
thing to make these folks worth while. 

When a city has doubled its population in ten years, 
the whole country applauds and exclaims, " Verily, here 
is another Chicago. Let us go hither and grow up 
with it." 

And yet half of the people in that city may wish they 
were dead. 

Population is the chief curse of the American city. 
If the census figures could be suppressed they would 
have to measure success in some other way. If we 
didn't have any censuses American cities might some 
day be bragging of their per capita wages and savings 
bank deposits. Commercial clubs might be ejecting 
factories which ground up workmen too carelessly and 
Chicago might some day boast that it didn't have a 
house without a bath tub. Nobody is proud of a house 
with two families in each room. Yet when a city has 



i8o SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

acquired 50,000 extra population which cannot read 
English and live in tenements, in which one wash bowl 
has to do for a whole voting precinct, it looks with 
scorn upon the slow old burg down the line which has 
built nine new churches and a municipal playground 
but can only show a ten per cent, increase of population. 
American cities will not be worth while until they 
forget population and remember their people. 



FADS 181 



DIVORCE 

DIVORCE is an operation for the removal of a 
husband or wife. It is performed by a lawyer 
instead of a surgeon and can be done without 
an anaesthetic, though the fee is as large as if it had to 
be done with knives, saws, stump pullers and electric 
massage. It is not painful except when cross bills and 
co-respondents set in, but is subject to severe after- 
effects, such as alimony, which keep the victim finan- 
cially bedridden for years. 

In other countries divorce is resorted to only as a 
relief, and is regarded as being too serious to use as a 
cure for wife-beating or other minor troubles. In this 
country divorce is used as repartee, as a diversion, an 
advertisement, as second thought and as a means of 
playing that fascinating game known as " progressive 
marriage." Divorce in this country is so common that 
the slip knot is now being tied by all ministers. 
Couples marry for better or divorce. In New York, 
where people are so prosperous that they are not afraid 
of lawyers, it takes longer to call off the matrimonial 
history of a society leader than it does to announce the 
ancestry of a Bostonese. 

Causes for divorce vary in different States which, to- 
gether with the low rates and excellent train service, is 
a great convenience. In South Carolina there is no ex- 
cuse for divorce, while in Reno, Nevada, a $100 bill is 
considered ample reason. In Illinois divorce is as free 
as air to the lowest as well as the highest, and the wife 



i82 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

who burns beefsteak or the husband whose feet perspire 
have no legal standing and are likely to lose their mat- 
rimonial jobs at any time. It usually takes a young 
couple a year or two to decide whether they are fitted 
for matrimony, but in Chicago they marry first and de- 
cide afterward with the help of the judge. 

Owing to the ease in which divorce can be obtained 
in this country, it is being greatly overdone. Wives 
are getting divorces in order to raise their husbands' 
salaries and husbands are getting divorces in order to 
improve their wives' complexions. One wife at a time 
is still the rule in this country, but the shortness of the 
time is causing a great deal of remark. It is time for 
reform. Every man or woman is entitled to make one 
mistake, but when a husband has proven a repeated fiz- 
zle, he should be compelled to go back to the lunch 
counter brigade for the rest of his life and give the 
bachelors a chance. 



PASTIMES 

The United States is the land of pastimes. 
The American earns his living in fewer hours 
than the citizen of any other civilized land 
and spends the rest of the time devotedly 
in sports and games. This is why the sport- 
ing sections of American newspapers occupy 
two pages while the editorials are boiled down 
into two columns ; it explains also why the en- 
terprising churches are preparing to mount 
themselves on wheels in order to follow the 
populace on Sunday. 



i 

I, 



PASTIMES 185 



BASEBALL 

BASEBALL is played by a grandstand full of ma- 
niacs assisted by eighteen players in uniform, a 
national commission, a box full of sporting writ- 
ers, a book of rules as thick as the Illinois code, and a 
low-browed pirate called an umpire. The object of 
baseball is to win the game for the home team. To do 
this it is sometimes necessary for the spectators to yell 
continuously for three hours at a time. This develops 
marvelous endurance. There are prominent business 
men in the United States who can pick out a player 100 
yards away during a riot and can address a remark 
to him which he will not only hear but which will make 
him fighting mad. 

Baseball calls for great skill in many directions. It 
is often necessary for a spectator to invent as many as 
fifty excuses in a season for leaving his work to assist 
at a baseball game. Some of our greatest politicians 
are baseball fans, who have obtained their marvelous 
ability to explain their votes in this manner. Baseball 
develops the lungs to a wonderful degree and also en- 
ables a man to hang by one hand to a crowded street car 
for five miles at a time without discomfort. It pro- 
duces great skill in throwing pop bottles, cushions and 
lemons, enriches the conversation and makes the devo- 
tee impervious to heat. Moreover, by the end of Au- 
gust many a baseball enthusiast has become so inured 
to hard pine benches that he can sit in a church pew 
upwards of fifteen minutes on a winter Sunday before 
succumbing to the discomfort. 



i86 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

To assist at a baseball game requires close attention 
and constant effort. The opposing pitcher must be 
persuaded that he has an arm like an old rubber hose 
and the base runner must be reminded that the man on 
third is a wooden Indian, who has lost his original job 
through old age. The baseball spectator who neglects 
to remind the visiting batter that he couldn't hit a 
baseball if it was nailed to a fence often allows a home 
run by his carelessness. In an empty arena the New 
York Giants would play bush league ball while a city 
full of skilled spectators could make a good race for a 
baseball pennant with a team of Egyptian mummies. 

Baseball has not only enriched the American vocabu- 
lary, but it has cured thousands of cases of serious ill- 
nesses which have developed suddenly in the morning 
and have been cured by an afternoon at the game. It 
makes summer worth enduring for business men, office 
boys, actors, sporting writers, and vast numbers of 
plain people. It takes precedence of stocks, accidents, 
the doings of Congress and the health of kings in the 
newspapers. Romances are tame beside the last day 
thrills of a struggle for the pennant, and man's quick- 
est heartbeats are produced by slides to second, home 
runs in the ninth inning and strikeouts with the bases 
full. 

If ever the American nation is struck dumb, baseball 
will perish. But so long as we are not too dignified to 
yell, it will reign unrivaled in the dog days. 



PASTIMES 187 



FOOTBALL 

FOOTBALL is an effort on the part of forty-four 
shin guards to occupy the same place at the same 
time. It is classed as a game, but looks more 
like a clinic. It is called football, because the ball is 
about a foot long. 

It takes twenty-two men to play football and some- 
where near twice that number to keep them in repair. 
An automobile is durability itself beside a football 
player. In our large colleges, the football garage is 
constantly filled during the Fall with football players, 
who have had to go into the back shop for a thorough 
overhauling. The chief objects used in the game be- 
side the players are a referee's whistle, two goal posts, 
a red cross wagon, a barrel of splints, a loud virulent 
yell, a carload of flags and a few thousand rooters with 
brass-lined throats. A rooter is a baseball fan with a 
cold-weather carburetor. He can stand for hours in 
the snow and yell without disturbing anyone outside of 
his own congressional district. 

The football is used in the game to locate the dis- 
turbance. Wherever the ball is, there is no more peace 
than there is in a love-feast with an insurgent in it. 
The object of the game is to take the ball down the field 
to the goal over, under and through the opposition with- 
out the aid of axes, saws, carving knives, battering rams 
or dynamite. Those who have seen a good football team 
in action will realize how little these things are needed 
anyway. 



i88 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

Football is not a peaceable game, and is also dan- 
gerous. Some football players are so unscrupulous as 
to fall down before the advancing runner and twist his 
ankle by getting it tangled up in their ribs. Fre- 
quently also, the man with the ball will snag himself 
severely on a broken bone, while going through an oppo- 
nent, or will dent his head on an adversary's teeth, or 
will slip on a slippery face and twist his knee until he 
yells with pain. 

Football requires various talents. A football player 
should weigh 180 pounds and should have copper fas- 
tened teeth, reenforced concrete shins, a lithe, limber 
backbone and angle iron knees. He should also have a 
duplicate nose if possible. The player should be so 
hard that he can dent a locomotive and yet so flexible 
that he can emerge from beneath twenty-one men, reach 
out his arm twenty-seven feet and plant the ball between 
the goal posts. He should also be able to grab a 13- 
inch shell around the waist and hold it until help ar- 
rives. If possible, a football player should refrain 
from marriage. 

Football is played mostly by collegians because by 
the time a man is out of college he has sense enough not 
to play it. An old player can be told by the quiet way 
in which he doesn't dodge street cars, automobiles, 
hoodlums and lightning. If they hit him it is their own 
fault, and he does not hold himself responsible for the 
consequences. 



PASTIMES 189 



CORN HUSKING 

CORN HUSKING is a national game which begins 
about the time baseball peters out and continues 
until the blizzard season. It produces the same 
distressing results to the fingers as baseball does, but 
as a dividend producer it is about a thousand times 
more effective. 

Corn husking is not a college diversion but has sent 
thousands of bojs to college and has given them their 
sinewy wrists with which to grasp the flying halfback by 
the spinal column and check him in his mad career. 
Corn husking cannot be played in a stadium or amphi- 
theater. It requires more room than golf. A forty- 
acre field will keep 100 golfers busy for years, but a 
100-acre field will only last two expert corn buskers for 
a few weeks. 

Corn husking is the most valuable exercise in Amer- 
ica. Corn that hasn't been husked is as valueless as a 
Salome dancer in street clothes. Hundreds of throb- 
bing geniuses have spent their lives in trying to invent 
a machine which will deftly remove an ear of corn from 
its garments and toss it into a wagon, but the only 
entirely reliable machine of this sort in use is the farmer 
boy who rises at 4 a. m. and grasps 100 bushels of corn 
ears firmly between his aching thumb and forefinger be- 
fore the sun goes down. 

The rules of corn husking are very simple. The 
busker arms himself with a pair of large mittens with 
armored thumbs and follows a wagon across a cornfield 



IQO SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

denuding two rows of stalks as he goes and trying to 
keep the horses from eating themselves to death while 
waiting for him. The wagon keeps moving all day long 
and if the husker is beside it at night he wins. If he 
isn't, the wagon wins. It is a very exciting game, 
but not suitable for delicate young athletes with fragile, 
manicured fingers. Many a man who can follow a golf 
ball all day long with the grim tenacity of a foxhound 
following an anise seed bag has retired from a husking 
game at noon with a low moan and a bunch of desiccated 
digits. 

There are many husking experts who can keep three 
ears in the air right along and can hurl 200 bushels of 
corn into a wagon in ten hours, only missing it occa- 
sionally. A man who can do this is more useful to hu- 
manity than the man who can hurl 200 spit balls per 
day before shouting thousands or the daredevil who can 
travel 200 miles an hour on a motorcycle in the last 
stages of hydrophobia. There are 4,000,000,000 bush- 
els of corn to be undressed and hurled in this country 
each fall, and only a few million red-necked and horny- 
fingered farmer boys stand between us and ruin. 



PASTIMES 191 



TREATING 

TREATING is an American pastime. It is also 
Exhibit A in the European effort to prove that 
all Americans are crazy. 

Treating is the process of drinking a drink which you 
do not want in order to buy another man a drink which 
he probably doesn't want, and then drinking another 
drink which you want still less in order to give him the 
opportunity of paying you back before you set him 
down as a tight wad who would rather squander his 
money on hats for his wife than in a noble effort to 
drown his friends. 

This, however, is only the beginning of a treat. 
Then the first man, having drunk two drinks which he 
didn't want, buys the second man another which he 
doesn't want, and drinks a third on himself which is as 
unwelcome as a ninth cousin at Thanksgiving. 

After which two other men come in and the treatee 
buys the treater another drink and one for himself, 
which he hasn't room for, and also buys drinks for the 
two newcomers. 

Then each of the two newcomers buys drinks for the 
other three, after which the original treater repays the 
new obligation by buying the original treatee his 
seventh drink and drinks for the two newcomers and 
another for himself, which he has to push down with a 
swab. Then the treatee indignantly demands that he 
be allowed to square himself and he buys drinks for all 
the four and for three strangers who have dropped in 



192 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

and who immediately prove that they are free-born pa- 
triots by buying drinks for everybody. Then the orig- 
inal treater, having poured the ninth, tenth, and elev- 
enth drinks on his hair, buys a barrel of refreshments 
for the other six men and four more whom he goes out 
and drags in by force, gives his watch to the bartender, 
tells the free lunch the story of his freshly pickled young 
life and goes to sleep on the ash can in the alley, weep- 
ing over the fact that Cleopatra was no lady. 

Treating is etiquette and is more rigidly observed 
than most State and national laws. A man must always 
buy a drink when his turn comes. Only death or paral- 
ysis of the barkeeper can stop the rotation. Conse- 
quently, thousands of men who go into bar rooms to ab- 
sorb a small snifter of beer apiece are rescued from the 
bar later in the day by the life-saving crew in a taxicab 
after incredible perils. 

Some men are so mean and lost to all sense of honor 
or decency that they will not only go home after being 
treated without treating back, but will sneak away and 
drink by themselves. These men should, of course, be 
avoided. They can be told by their pale complexions 
and almost painful sobriety. 



PASTIMES 193 



GETTING RICH 

GETTING rich is the greatest American game. 
The season lasts twelve months each year, Sun- 
days included, and the players include prac- 
tically all the citizens able to distinguish the salient 
points of difference between a dollar and a stick of 
candy. 

The getting rich game is played on all kinds of fields. 
Some men play it for sixty years on a flat top desk, 
while others use a 10,000-acre farm and still others a 
small, green baize covered table. There are no stand- 
ard implements for playing the game either. Some 
men use a stock ticker, some a twine binder and some 
the small but eloquent pocket instrument of conversa- 
tion, which can make eight speeches with one loading. 
Some men play the game by betting a thousand dollars 
on a horse race in the hope of accumulating another 
thousand. Others prefer to save up $25,000 and in- 
vest it all in a rubber company in the hopes of getting 
spinal trouble while trying to lug home the dividends. 
In both cases the principle is the same, but in the for- 
mer the end comes more speedily and is comparatively 
painless. 
I Getting rich is a sort of catch-as-catch-can game. 
I There are no rules to speak of. Generally speaking, 
j in polite circles it is not proper to club a man while tak- 
( ing his money away from him. But this is only be- 
I cause more convenient methods have been perfected. 
j The coarse hold-up man who beats his victim with a gas 



194 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

pipe while subduing him is looked upon with great scorn 
by the soft spoken captain of skindustry who sells the 
same victim a little preferred stock and then runs the 
price down until said victim parting asks him as a per- 
sonal favor to take it back for nothing. 

Getting rich is a peculiar game because everybody 
loses and nobody wins. Some men lose health and oth- 
ers reputation. Some lose a happy and carefree youth, 
while others lose their patriotism. Some mislay their 
wives and families in their mad enthusiasm, while prac- 
tically all players lose their ability to distinguish be- 
tween the laws and a good lawyer who will obey orders 
and no questions asked. 

Nobody wins in this game because nobody really gets 
rich. As soon as a man has gotten $10,000 and can 
afford to wear two clean collars a week, he discovers 
that $50,000 is the winning mark. When he makes 
$50,000 he learns how to become a millionaire. When 
he gets his million he is so embarrassed in the company 
of the real plutocrat that he blushes whenever he thinks 
of his pile. And just as he has accumulated $100,000,- 
000 and has perfected plans for taking over the earth 
in a limited liability company, Death scythes him down 
and his bright prospects are everlastingly blighted. 

Getting rich is more fatal than pugilism, dueling, or 
playing with matches in a powder mill but nobody ob- 
jects to it. Some of us would if we were not too busy 
— getting rich. 



BRAGGING POINTS 

Owing to the great unwillingness of other 
nations to brag about us we Americans have 
been compelled to do our own boasting. We 
are as thorough and successful in this as we 
are in other occupations. There are over 
1,000,000 separate and distinct bragging 
points in this country of which the ones which 
follow are perhaps the most deserving. 



n 



BRAGGING POINTS 197 



THE PANAMA CANAL 

THE Panama Canal, which is now open for business 
at the old stand, is a fifty-mile-long gash in the 
face of Nature, which would be visible from the 
moon with the aid of the Yerkes telescope. It is the 
largest alteration and improvement on the planet which 
has been accomplished by man up to date and has been 
done in the past ten years by 100,000 workmen, a few 
sets of high powered brains and a shipload of mosquito 
netting. 

For many hundred years men have wanted to dig the 
Panama Canal, and several very costly attempts have 
been made. But while plenty of help could be secured 
and boatloads of money were available, the exact model 
of brain required could not be found and no attention 
was paid to mosquito netting. As a result, while the 
Panama district became one of the most flourishing 
cemeteries in the world it was never navigable to 
any extent. This is a scientific age, and nothing 
proves it more extensively than the fact that when the 
United States engineers tackled the job of moving sev- 
eral hundred million tons of earth and rock they began 
by chasing a mosquito into a corner and killing him 
with a kerosene can. As a result Panama, which was 
once a trifle more fatal than bichloride of mercury tab- 
lets, is now one of our leading winter resorts and the 
workman who tires of life and wishes to fade away as 
former workmen once did by thousands has to hire a 
personal friend to kill him with a club. 



198 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

The Panama Canal unites the Atlantic and Pacific 
Oceans and severs the neighborly feeling between Eng- 
land and America. By means of the Canal 30,000-ton 
ships will be hoisted deftly over the mangled back bone 
of the continent and dumped safely into deep water on 
the other side. It has cost upwards of $500,000,000, 
and no one has gotten rich off of it. Thus, without go- 
ing into tedious dimension details we can say with con- 
fidence that it is the eighth wonder of the world and 
the first wonder of American politics. 

In order to dig the Panama Canal the Government 
had to cut a mountain in two, build a large navigable 
lake, pull a river up by the roots, build locks big enough 
to hold an exposition building, change a climate, es- 
tablish a revolutionless Central American republic and 
keep several thousand politicians at bay. All this was 
successfully accomplished under Colonel Goethals, the 
world's greatest locksmith and geographical surgeon ■ — 
which leads us to hope that the Government will now 
have the courage to tackle the Mississippi River and 
make it behave. 



BRAGGING POINTS 199 



ON "PUSH" 

PUSH " is the process of getting ahead, if neces- 
sary, over the feet and faces of the crowd in 
front. 

This country is the home of " push." Owing to the 
constant endeavor of the rear rank to become leaders, 
a man does not sit down contented in a good job in the 
United States for two reasons. First, because he hopes 
to push the fellow ahead of him out of his place, and 
second, because the fellow behind him is pushing on him 
day and night. 

" Push " consists of getting down to business early 
and taking it home with you at night ; of selling a steam 
thresher to the man who came in for a half-inch nut 
and washer; of doing business on the sidewalk, while 
one's store is burning up across the street; of getting 
the other fellow's trade away from him without using a 
club, unless absolutely necessary; of advertising until 
men go on Arctic expeditions to get away from your 
trademark; in short, of grabbing Opportunity a mile 
down the street, dragging him in by the heels and mak- 
ing a door boy out of him. 

One hundred years ago the United States had less 
than 8,000,000 people, a lot of debts, a war about ready 
to hatch, and a few men of " push." They kept push- 
ing until the country had to enlarge five times to take 
care of its business. In the last twenty years, Amer- 
icans have pushed harder than ever until this nation 
is now the wealthiest on the globe, and all over the 



200 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

world foreigners are rubbing sore spots and comment- 
ing bitterly upon American " push." 

" Push " is what is digging the Panama Canal and 
building ready-made cities of 100,000 people such as 
Gary, Indiana. " Push " got the New York sky- 
scraper up 800 feet and filled Detroit so full of auto- 
mobile factories that it takes all the air in one ward 
each day to pump up the tires of the new machines. 
But " push " has also filled the federal prisons full of 
bankers, who tried to make a few yards through the 
law, and " push " has made public officials out of a 
great many men whose only qualification was their abil- 
ity to get up early in the morning and collect votes 
when the sheriff wasn't looking. 

" Push " has made this a mighty country and a very 
uncomfortable one. With the meat men, the wheat 
men, the shoe men, and the oil men all trying to become 
instantaneous millionaires by means of " push," the 
average citizen is full of bruises where he has been 
" pushed." " Push " is a good motto, but " Quit your 
shoving " isn't so bad, either. 



BRAGGING POINTS 201 



INDEPENDENCE 

AMONG its other natural resources America has a 
peculiarly rich vein of independence. 
Independence is a reenforcement in the back- 
bone which makes a man want to do things by himself, 
even if he has to push a tyrant in the face to accom- 
plish it. 

Being independent is usually exciting and seldom 
pleasant. Independence and trouble are old college 
chums. They come to a man arm in arm, and as he 
shakes hands with Independence, Trouble climbs right 
onto his back and takes up permanent quarters there. 

Many years ago the American colonies decided to be- 
come independent. This made England very angry 
and she declared that if she found any independence in 
an American colonist, she would shoot it out of him and 
very likely damage him permanently at the same time. 

Then the American colonists held a great meeting in 
Philadelphia and issued a declaration which invited 
England to come over and shoot away until she got 
tired. It took England five years to get tired and 
many a patriot had his independence shot away, but 
not until his liver and pancreas had gone first. 

The Declaration of Independence is still celebrated 
each year in this country. Some people claim this is 
all foolishness, because there is no more independence. 
They claim that the entire country has been capitalized 
in six per cent, cumulative stock by various gentlemen 
residing within easy walking distance of Wall Street. 



202 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

This is not true, however. The American citizen is 
still so independent that he will walk ten miles to hit a 
trust with a brick. The trouble is, the trust usually 
buys the brick from him before he throws it. 

There is plenty of independence in this country, but 
most of it has been bought up. The meat trust has so 
much independence that it recently told the government ■! 
to go to grass. 

Independence is a very precious thing and brings a 
high market price nowadays. Even the bravest tyrant 
would hardly dare to stop an American and take his in- 
dependence away from him. He would also be very 
foolish to attempt it when it can be done so much easier 
by giving said citizen a small oflSce or a big rebate. 



BRAGGING POINTS 203 



AMBITION 

AMBITION is the stuff that schemes are made of 
— particularly political schemes. It is also a 
sort of mental tack which makes it uncomforta- 
ble for a man to sit down. It is likewise a grim task- 
master which takes him by the ear when he has finished 
the things he has to do, and leads him over to a pile of 
things which he has a chance to do. 

America was once full of slaves who toiled nineteen 
hours a day for their cruel owners. Nowadays it is 
full of slaves who toil the same hours for ambition, and 
plan new tasks for themselves during the other five. 

Ambition has filled this land full of millionaires, 
bankrupts, statesmen, jangled nerves, busted digestions, 
poor piano players and unhappy fathers-in-law of for- 
eign noblemen. This indicates that ambition isn't al- 
ways a good thing — which is strictly true. Ambition 
is a grand thing when properly fitted with check valves, 
brakes and clutch-releases. But when ambition takes 
a man and yanks him from the cradle to the tomb with- 
out giving him a day off to go out in the country and 
hear the corn grow, it is no better than a runaway 
horse. 

The world never gets tired of viewing the marvels 
wrought by ambition. Ambition is fond of picking up 
human riff-raff such as cripples, orphans, ignoramuses, 
invalids and truant school boys, and making them into 
artists, poets, generals, statesmen and presidents. Am- 
bition, plus a small man with a receding chin, is more 



204 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

formidable than a giant with a college education and a 
fine taste in easy chairs. 

Ambition is harder on content than a cat is on a 
mouse. It is also tolerably hard on honesty, but it 
likewise eradicates laziness and shiftlessness, and when 
a man is suffering from a large dose of concentrated 
ambition he may be found in a sanitarium, but it is 
perfectly useless to look for him in a poorhouse. 

America contained vast natural deposits of ambition 
and when these were combined with immigration, the 
result was the United States. An American is an Eng- 
lishman plus ambition. An Englishman hurries up his 
work so that he can have tea at four and get into his 
flannels. An American hurries up his work so that he 
can take another man's j ob away from him and do it be- 
fore supper time. Ambition doesn't often make a man 
more pleasant to have around, but it generally makes 
him much more useful to his widow. 

Ambition, like a great many other things, is often 
sadly misplaced. There are a great many fine truck 
drivers, shoe repairers and pie builders who will not 
stop trying to be politicians, violinists, and social lead- 
ers until they are operated upon for ambition. 



BRAGGING POINTS 205 



REFORMERS 

A REFORMER is a man who insists on peddling 
recipes for the millennium to people who are 
much more interested in golf, automobiles, free 
lunches and appeals to the Supreme Court. 

Reformers are America's greatest blessing and an- 
noyance. They are more pestiferous and uncomforta- 
ble than mosquitoes, because they work both day and 
night, summer and winter, and cannot be demolished by 
a mere slap of the hand. A man who has amassed a 
million dollars by a nice little ward organization, or a 
cozy little railroad, or a comfortable corner in ice can 
keep mosquitoes and other nuisances out of his palace 
by means of screens and oil of wintergreen, but the re- 
former creeps in with the morning newspaper and the 
monthly magazine, and stabs him in his easy chair with 
ever increasing vigor. There is practically no anti- 

' dote for, or escape from, them except to flee to Russia, 

i where they use stern measures with these pests, and keep 
them from talking by means of a stout rope tied tightly 
around the windpipe. Russia has almost no reformers 

i left and yet immigration to this paradise is very small 

i indeed. 

J Reformers are a nuisance, because they are continu- 
ally waking up happy people and calling their attention 

!to their sorrows. They have never given us any rest. 
When a few self-sacrificing patriots elected our presi- 
dents for us a century ago, the reformers yelled until a 
popular vote with all its annoyances was introduced. 



i 



206 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

When the country became healthy and great, the re- 
formers were not content until we had gone to war to ■; 
free the slaves; and even to-day when prosperity is so 
inconceivable that the working man has to carry his 
week's salary down to the meat market in a wheelbar- 
row, the reformers will not let us be happy, but keep 
on talking about pure food and conservation and re- 
vised House rules and popular ownership of Senators 
and deodorized big business and other idle dreams, until 
life is hardly worth living except for poor men. 

The only way to quiet a reformer is to give him what 
he wants and this is only a temporary relief, for he soon 
figures out another reform and begins to shout for it. 

Reformers have made us a civilized and unhappy peo- 
ple, whereas without them we would still be living con- 
tentedly under the protection of a fatherly old baron 
who would do our thinking for us and would hang us 
tenderly from his castle walls if we presumed to bother 
ourselves about it. 



DRAWBACKS 

Even the Garden of Eden had a snake in 
it. Portions of the United States are perfect 
and then again other portions need energetic 
fumigation. We are proud of our progress 
but we will never be entirely satisfied until 
something is done about the following draw- 
backs of our beloved land. 



DRAWBACKS 209 



TORNADOES 

NO man is a real thirty-third degree American until 
he has helped pile up and put together some town 
or city after a tornado has toyed with it. 
The tornado makes its lair in the Mississippi and 
Missouri valleys as a rule. It is a grizzly gray green- 
ish cloud with a long funnel attachment which extends 
down to earth and sucks up the scenery with horrible 
avidity. This funnel whirls at the rate of 11,000,000 
revolutions a minute and as it proceeds across the coun- 
try, it picks up farm houses, chickens, locomotives, 
churches, hay stacks, school houses, blackberry patches, 
and national banks and carries them away. This 
shows the natural viciousness of the tornado. It has 
no use for these things — it only carries them away to 
cause annoyance. After mixing them up thoroughly, 
filling the school houses with locomotives, impaling the 
hay stack on the church steeple, picking the feathers 
from the chickens and mixing them with $5.00 bills, it 
deposits the mess in the next county in a forty-acre 
stand of wheat, folds up its funnel and goes away to 
take another bite out of civilization somewhere else. 
You can follow the path of a tornado across a whole 
State by the things which aren't there. Even a city 
detective could do it. 

Tornadoes rise in the southwest and proceed north- 
east, like Ex-senator Bailey, leaving consternation 
in their wake. Like Nero and other pitiless monsters, 
they are frivolous by nature and love to produce quaint 



210 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

obituaries and unique horrors, such as blowing wheat 
straws through hired men, turning orphan asylums in- 
side out, stuffing cows into pianos and tearing the 
clothes off of the dazed citizen, leaving him arrayed in 
his politics ten miles from where home would have been 
if it had been let alone. In the old days when cyclones 
infested Kansas a great deal, the State was full of 
mournful farmers hunting for misplaced houses, barns, 
cellars and sorting out tangled fences and county lines. 
When a tornado visits a town it only stays a minute 
or two, but it is mentioned for years, and everyone re- 
members dates by it. Tornadoes can be avoided by 
dodging behind a mountain or into a small cellar with 
a stout door on top, but cannot be argued with or suc- 
cessfully opposed. However, no tornado has ever met 
Col. Roosevelt on a campaign tour. Tornadoes have 
more luck than some presidents. 



DRAWBACKS 211 



REVOLVERS 

THIS country would be happier and healthier if 
revolvers cost a million dollars apiece. 
A revolver is a nickel-plated substitute for 
bravery, which has practically driven the original arti- 
cle out of the market. It is a small, loud instrument 
with a cylinder, a trigger and a barrel, through which 
lead bullets can be deposited with great ease and ra- 
pidity in burglars, pedestrians, political adversaries, 
and personal friends against whom the owner of the re- 
volver may be temporarily prejudiced. 

The revolver gives a puny man with a %-inch brain 
and the pluck of a grasshopper a 100-yard reach and 
makes him more deadly than a Sioux Indian. There 
was a time when this country had no dangerous animals, 
except bears and wolves, and life was safe, except on 
the frontiers, but now vast hordes of sfxteen-year-old 
boys who use their skulls for a dime novel bookcase, 
roam the streets with cigarettes in their faces and port- 
able cannon in their hip pockets, producing obituaries 
with the skill and enthusiasm of a cholera microbe ; while 
it is at all times possible to meet a personal enemy who 
has been chasing you for a week, and who is reluctantly 
compelled to defend himself when he catches you by fill- 
ing you so full of lead that your remains will require 
eight pall-bearers. 

Revolvers are now so generally used in debate, in do- 
mestic quarrels and repartee of all sorts that 8,000 
Americans die of them each year. In India about this 



212 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

number of natives die from cobra bites each year and 
the government is doing its best to extinguish the co- 
bras. But in America revolvers are being perfected 
each year, and are now given away as premiums with 
tea and soap. The latest models, moreover, keep right 
on shooting when the trigger is pulled, which makes it 
possible for the owner to get not only the man he is 
shooting at, but a few bystanders and a baby or two 
in the bargain. 

No man should be allowed to carry a revolver except 
a policeman and he should be required to count up to 
10,000 before using it. 



DRAWBACKS 213 



WALL STREET 

WALL Street was originally a proper name de- 
noting a street in New York City. Now it is 
an improper name used generally as an epi- 
thet by the indignant public. 

The real Wall Street is situated in New York City 
midway between the Club district and the bread line. 
It is the popular thoroughfare to each of these places 
and is always thronged with travelers fighting to get 
to one destination or the other. It is named Wall 
Street because so many people go to the wall there. It 
is a short, narrow street, about two blocks long, three 
blocks high and so narrow that thousands of people 
are squeezed every year trying to get through it. It 
is the crookedest street in the world. Sometimes it has 
as many as half a dozen corners in one block. 

Along Wall Street are the stock exchanges and the 
offices of a great many permanent and temporary rich 
men, all of whom are engaged in watching the prices of 
stocks and wondering whether they will buy a new auto- 
mobile or pawn the old one that evening. Riding up 
and down the elevator of prosperity is the favorite 
Wall Street occupation. Here men do not take the 
time to climb the ladder of success. They use a balloon 
and the man who carries a parachute is a piker. 

Wall Street is the second largest menagerie in New 
York. It is full of bulls, bears, lambs, wolves, sharks, 
suckers and octopuses, while more than once the ele- 
phant, the donkey and the tiger have been caught fool- 



214 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

ing around here. Contrary to popular belief, it is also 
one of the greatest manufacturing districts in the 
world. It turns out a corporation every day, a mil- 
lionaire complete, every hour, and a job hunter every 
few minutes. It has made one or two presidents and a 
large number of senators have its name plate on their 
togas. It is also the most completely equipped crisis 
factory in existence. It can deliver a crisis in full 
working order on twenty-four hours' notice. 

Wall Street has been accused of a great many sins, 
most of which are sins of commission, but it is not as 
bad as it is painted. It does not work on Sunday and 
it saves a great many foolish young men from becom- 
ing millionaires and getting the gout. Wall Street is 
also very religious. The members worship the Lord 
on Sunday and J. P. Morgan on week days. 
Moreover, we must not forget, beloved readers, that it 
was Wall Street which gave us President Roosevelt by 
interring him in the Vice-presidency. This alone 
should make us think very kindly of it and patronize 
it whenever we are in need of walls. 



DRAWBACKS 215 



PULLMAN PORTERS 

A PULLMAN porter is a sad Senegambian who 
makes beds in a sleeping car for a living. He 
makes twenty-four beds each night and gets 
done just in time to begin unmaking them in the morn- 
ing. When business is brisk a porter sometimes has 
to go without food for three days, because he cannot 
take the end of a pillow slip from between his teeth long 
enough to snatch a bite. 

Besides making up beds, the porter has to polish 
shoes. All night long he polishes shoes, putting black 
polish on the tan ones and tan polish on the black ones 
with great care. He polishes all the shoes he can find 
and then puts them away in a pile. Then he goes away 
himself and stands out in the cold gray dawning on 
the rear platform for hours at a time, while his guests 
ring a bell that has been disconnected. However, he 
always gives the shoes back when he gets around to it. 
Sometim.es a greedy guest takes a second helping of 
shoes and the last man gets left, but this is not the por- 
ter's fault, and those who blame him wrong him cruelly. 

Porters are always dark men but they are not as 
dark as their deeds. A porter likes nothing better 
than to steal the whisk broom out of the wash room and 
then rent his own broom to the passengers for a quar- 
ter apiece. 

Porters are also absent-minded. While thinking 
about their wrongs, they forget to waken the sleeping 
passenger until the train is slowing down for his town. 



2i6 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

thus compelling him to dress lightly in his trousers and 
leap for life with a bushel of clothes in his arms. But 
porters are very faithful. All night long when he is 
not making berths or blackening shoes, the porter sits 
by the car heater and stokes it. If the thermometer 
drops below 111, he is ashamed, and weeps bitterly over 
his neglect. 

People criticise the Pullman porter because of his 
haughty ways and his gloomy disposition, but we 
should not forget his wrongs. What with trying to 
Unmake berths while the people are still in them and 
getting chased with a club because he has grabbed a 
sleeping passenger by the nose in trying to waken him, 
and what with spending a lifetime watching sleepy 
and ill-natured mankind in its stocking feet and with- 
out its collar on, he cannot help souring a little. So 
we should be kind to the porter at least a quarter's 
worth each trip and should not forget, when retiring, 
to attach a string to a great toe and hang it outside the 
berth curtain in order that he may not be compelled to 
feel around for our hair in the dark while waking us. 



DRAWBACKS 217 



IMPORTED HUSBANDS 

IMPORTED husbands have been all the rage, in 
those American circles which are able to afford 
them, for some years. 

An imported husband is the most stylish thing that 
can be roped in with a marriage hcense. He costs all 
the way from a million dollars up, and usually doesn't 
last long at that. If a really flossy imported husband 
wears for five years he is doing very well indeed, and 
the friends of the purchaser remark in complimentary 
terms upon her powers of endurance. 

Imported husbands usually come as incumbrances on 
titles. It is impossible to get a title in this country 
without a husband attached which makes it very awk- 
ward for those fortunate young ladies who have every- 
thing else but a title. If titles without husbands were 
put on the market in this country they would have an 
enormous sale and the astute country which went into 
the business would be able to take a large slice off of 
its national debt. 

Imported husbands come over free of duty and return 
the same way. In fact, duty and titled husbands are 
usually strangers and continue so until the divorce 
court gets in its work. 

Shipped-in husbands would not be so bad if they 
could be kept in this country where the fathers-in-law 
could occasionally get at them with a club. Unfor- 
tunately, after an American girl has imported a hus- 
band she has to go back to Europe with him. The 



2i8 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

worst thing about imported husbands in this country is 
exported wives. 

Europe is pretty well sprinkled with American wives 
who accompanied their purchases back to the old coun- 
try and have never been able to save steamer fare home 
out of their pin money. An imported husband costs 
more to run than an imported automobile. But this is 
because, as a rule, he is about twice as fast as anything 
else on earth. 

Imported husbands wouldn't be so bad if they came 
with the usual accessories considered necessary in this 
country for a first-class, permanent husband. When 
an imported husband is accompanied by morals, intelli- 
gence and ability, he makes as fine a husband as the 
domestic brand. There should be an import duty of 
1,000,000 per cent, on all others. 



DRAWBACKS 219 



CABARETS 

A CABARET is one of the importations from 
France which has been overlooked by the party 
in favor of prohibitive tariff. It consists of a 
restaurant afflicted with both food and vaudeville. 
Moreover, both must be consumed at the same time. 

The cabaret originated in Paris, and is said to have 
been invented because of the vast amount of time wasted 
by Parisians in stepping around to the stage door to 
get acquainted with the performers. It is a peram- 
bulating vaudeville in which the artiste may begin her 
stunt on the stage, but is just as likely as not to finish 
it in the lap of a dignified and startled old gentleman 
in the rear of the restaurant. 

The cabaret show gained great fame because of its 
informality and sociability. An ounce of dignity 
would run a cabaret show for several thousand years 
and nothing could be more sociable than a dinner table 
with four kinds of wine and a Parisian dancer on it. 
For many years it was the sacred duty of the American 
tourist to visit a cabaret in Paris, and the cloak and 
suit buyer who had not had his toes stepped upon by a 
beautiful young lady Tangoist during the soup course 
in a Paris cafe was considered too green for good com- 
pany. 

A few years ago the cabaret show was transplanted 
to New York, where it grew luxuriantly and proved a 
great boon to a large number of metropolitan citizens 
who were slowly starving to death for the want of suf- 



220 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

ficient music to enable them to masticate their food. 
It is now possible to buy in New York for $2.00 a nine- 
course vaudeville entertainment accompanied by food. 
With a little practice one can become very skillful in 
devouring these dances and can turkey trot a steak or 
grape-vine an oyster with great deftness. Amer- 
ica contains few more startling sights than that of a 
room full of well-dressed citizens looping their soup 
to the strains of a Tango tune while ever and anon an 
exquisitely painted entertaineress flits down the aisle 
and hurdles a waiter. 

Some critics of the cabaret show insist that it is 
popular because it helps the public to endure the res- 
taurant meals — while others declare that the meals 
deaden the audience to the terror of the performance. 
However, the cabaret has spread more rapidly than the 
dandelion and seems to be as hard to eradicate. 



DRAWBACKS 221 



WASTE 

THE United States is full of waste in many forms. 
Waste money is one of our most serious troubles. 
After a man has spent all the money he can sensi- 
bly and still has more, he often pours it down his throat 
to get rid of it, with terrible results. 

Food is so plentiful in the United States that we are 
very wasteful in its use. After an American family 
has finished a dinner, a French family can live high off 
the remains. The garbage barrel is the best fed insti- 
tution in the country. 

Time is scandalously wasted. Many a man wastes 
so much time in business that he hasn't any left in which 
to make himself worth talking to or to insure his being 
buried with regret. 

Government is full of waste. Our cities usually elect 
two or three aldermen with brains and a lot more for 
which it cannot find the slightest use. However, no city 
is wasted by its aldermen. They get everything they 
can out of it. 

Religion is extremely wasteful. Many a small town 
supports five ministers' families on hope and potatoes 
and keeps up five churches with five bells, whereas one 
bell would make enough disturbance to call the people 
to one church, which could be presided over by one min- 
ister with a well-fed appearance and no doubts. 

There is an appalling waste of conversation. Three- 
quarters of the conversation could be abolished and the 
output of thought would still be the same. The man 



222 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

who wastes a half hour each for 1,000 American citi- 
zens by loading up a few burning thoughts with fraz- 
zled adjectives and calling the result an oration, ought 
to be looked into by the conservation congress. 

There are nearly a hundred million people in this 
country and each year we waste enormous numbers of 
these because we are too much interested in gold, auto- 
mobiles and dividends to pry into the health statistics 
and to aid suffering humanity with something besides 
kind thoughts. When a nation is too busy to take care 
of its babies and clean up its slums, it ought to be 
kicked with great vigor in the capital and elsewhere. 



DRAWBACKS 223 



EXTRAVAGANCE 

EXTRAVAGANCE, according to the dictionary, 
is the process of expending profusely. 
But extravagance doesn't always mean the 
same thing. Some people expend profusely when they 
buy a bill collector a ten-cent cigar and ask him to 
come again for his money. Others live modestly so long 
as they make an automobile last a whole season. 

There was a time in this country when extravagance 
consisted of buying food at a store instead of raising 
it in the back yard. Nowadays the average man isn't 
extravagant until he orders a porterhouse steak at a 
first-class restaurant without looking at the price list. 
A long time ago people were extravagant whenever 
they spent money for things which they did not need. 
But no man is extravagant to-day unless he cashes in 
his life insurance to buy his wife an electric car. 

This is a disturbing situation. When a citizen of 
this great and horridly prosperous country does not 
feel that he is extravagant so long as he is only spend- 
ing money with one hand, it is time to be alarmed. 
I Presently the nation will have a financial chill and thou- 
] sands of happy Americans will take up the task of 
I trying to turn oriental rugs and player pianos into 
I groceries with no success at all. When a government 
erects $75,000 public buildings in order to save $1,000 
a year in postoffice rent ; when railroad directors buy 
branch lines for $1,000,000 and sell them to their com- 
panies for $16,000,000 in cash; when cities float bond 



224 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

issues in order to enlarge city halls so as to provide 
more room for janitors — it is hard to expect the com- 
mon plug American to hesitate and reflect before soak- 
ing his weekly pay check into a cabaret party with taxi- 
cab trimmings. 

America ought to begin to economize from the top 
down now instead of waiting until the constable bangs 
at the door with an attachment for the gas stove and 
the cut glass collection in the dining room. 



DRAWBACKS 225 



THE RAILWAY STATION 

THE reason why so few tourists from foreign 
countries love America is because they have 
been compelled to make too close a study of its 
railway stations. 

We do not refer to the vast marble-lined palaces now 
being built in our great cities, and in which it is possi- 
ble to run half a mile for a train after reaching the 
front door. We allude to the decayed dog house which 
does duty throughout the smaller towns of the country 
as a " deepo." 

The " deepo " is a terrestrial annex of purgatory 
which is used by railroad companies as a means of con- 
vincing its patrons of the desirability of staying at 
home. It is a small wooden shack equipped with a cross 
station agent, and lavishly fitted up for the comfort of 
its patrons with a window, a door, an extinct stove, 
which can be coaled up only by making a requisition 
to the board of directors, and a row of torture benches 
I called " seats " by the maniac who designed them. 
I '* Deepos " were designed by an enemy of man and 
I are maintained by perfect strangers to the human race. 
! In them people are supposed to wait hour after hour for 
i trains which do not come and in which the agent has no 
• interest. The waiters are assisted by a kerosene lamp, 
I which was cleaned in 1889, and a time card which was 
j nailed on the wall in the first Cleveland administration 
and has been accumulating inaccuracy ever since. In 
order that prospective passengers shall not be overcome 



226 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

by these luxuries and insist on staying in the " deepo " 
instead of boarding the trains, the waiting room seat 
was invented by the same man who invented the rack 
and the thumb screw. It is a hard slat bench made to 
fit a sack of potatoes and provided with a back which 
comes up just far enough to push the fifth vertebra out 
of place when the victim becomes exhausted and leans 
back to sleep. 

" Deepos " are painted every fifty years. They are 
never cleaned, but occasionally burn down. Then the 
railroad company unloads a box car for a " deepo " 
and so many people flock to enjoy the unaccustomed 
luxury that the company is compelled to build a new 
" deepo " in self-defense. 

The growth of interurban traffic in this country has 
been marvelous, and is a sad puzzle to railroad presi- 
dents, who claim that their trains are far more luxuri- 
ous than interurban cars. But the secret of the inter- 
urban's popularity is the fact that it has no " deepo." 
Its passengers wait on the street corners in the clear, 
pure air and amid dirt which is provided by nature. 

We are not personally acquainted with any railroad 
presidents, but presume they are coarse, rude individu- 
als who live in sheds and allow the pigs to come in for 
meals. They must be, or they would not be so well con- 
tent with the " deepos " along their railroads. 



PROBLEMS 

M^en the United States has nothing else 
to do it devotes a few hours to the solution of 
various problems which have loafed along 
through the decades under the head of ** Un- 
finished business." Thanking you one and all 
for your kind attention I shall close the en- 
tertainment with a discussion of a few of the 
problems which have put corrugations in the 
brow of the Goddess of Liberty and have 
bestrewn the American conversation with de- 
spairing cusswords. 



PROBLEMS 229 



EX-PRESIDENTS 

WHEN we haven't anything else to worry about 
In America we worry about our ex-presi- 
dents. 

An Ex-president is a man who has filled the biggest 
job in the world, and is trying to work down into or- 
dinary life again. This is a very difficult thing to do. 
When an Ex-president tries to squeeze into any other 
job, he usually stretches it all out of shape. Nothing 
is more disturbing than to watch an Ex-president try- 
ing to earn an honest living writing editorials, while 
fourteen reporters are interviewing him on the Balkan 
War. 

A President serves from four to eight years at $75,- 
000 a year, and accumulates during that time a thick 
mantle of dignity. When he retires from the presi- 
dency, he sheds the $75,000, but retains the dignity. 
It is as hard to earn a living while wrapped up in pres- 
idential dignity, as it is to run a foot race with nine 
overcoats on. Yet if an Ex-president should hang his 
dignity on a hickory limb and run for justice of the 
peace, the whole country would be indignant. 

Because of all these facts, several of our finest Ex- 
presidents have died with very little but dignity in the 
house. 

An Ex-president would make an Invaluable senator 
or representative or member of the supreme court, or 
cabinet officer, but most of them are allowed to go to 
>vaste by a hostile administration. This nation, which 



230 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

sheds tears every time some woodchopper fails to con- 
serve a pine tree, now possesses two Ex-presidents, and 
is not making as much use of them as it would of a 
1901 automobile. 

A commission should be appointed for the purpose 
of extracting all possible usefulness from Ex-presidents. 
When people have spent a million dollars electing a 
President, and half a million more teaching him states- 
manship, it ought not to turn him over to law colleges, 
magazines or publishing houses free of charge when 
his commission has expired. 

If Ex-presidents were turned loose for life into the 
House of Representatives or the Senate, they would be 
cheap, with their vast experience at twice the price, 
and could give lessons in patriotism and high motives 
which might possibly interest some of the newcomers. 

The present lot of the Ex-president is considered to 
be a sad one, but most of us would cheerfully undertake 
it even at half price. 



PROBLEMS 231 



THE TARIFF 

THE tariff is like a revolver. It is either a men- 
ace or a protection, depending on whether you 
are opposing it or are standing behind it. 

If jou are opposing the tariff, it is a cruel and hun- 
gry monster which reaches into the dinner bucket of 
the poor man and yanks the porterhouse steak and cold 
raspberry pie out of it. If you favor the tariff it is a 
benevolent high board fence which keeps the cruel mon- 
ster of foreign competition from getting at the same 
dinner pail. 

Any way you look at it, the tariff is intimately asso- 
ciated with the dinner pail. A good many people in- 
sist that it is the watch dog of the dinner pail, while 
others say that it never ipstys to give the dog the con- 
tents of said pail for watching it. 

The tariff lives in the customs house, but is borrowed 
by both Republican and Democratic parties during each 
campaign and led about the country for exhibition pur- 
poses. When Democrats exhibit the tariff, they do so 
with great terror, and pale statesmen endeavor to keep 
it from breaking out of its cage and devouring children, 
three at a gulp. 

On the other hand, when Republicans exhibit the 
tariff they put their arms lovingly around its neck and 
claim that it is as useful in a kitchen as two hired girls 
and a gas stove. On the whole, it is more fun to be a 
Republican than a Democrat, because a Democrat is so 
scared of the tariff all through the campaign that he 



232 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

can't sleep at night. A Democrat will link arms with a 
tiger and stroke his whiskers with pleasure, but let the 
tariff rise up ever so little and he shrieks for help from 
Maine to California. 

Republicans are very kind to the tariff and point 
with pride to its growth and height. But Democrats 
claim it should be cut in two close to the tail, and they 
would have done so last year when they had the thing 
tied up, if they had not been so afraid of it. 

We owe a great deal to the tariff, because it has pro- 
tected our infant industries until they could grow up 
and become carnivorous. 



PROBLEMS 233 



THE SLEEPING CAR 

THE sleeping car is one of the greatest of Ameri- 
can inventions. It enables the corporations to 
work us while we sleep. 

The sleeping car is filled with beautiful plush seats 
which are made more uncomfortable at night by being 
turned into berths. There are ordinarily twenty berths 
and each berth will hold one and three-fifths per- 
sons and a peck of cinders. The berths are divided 
into upper and lower berths respectively. The lower 
berths were much more popular because of their prox- 
imity to the floor until the Interstate Commerce Com- 
mission lowered the rates on the uppers, after which it 
was discovered that the long, hard climb to the upper 
berth is very beneficial and assists in producing sleep. 

To utilize a sleeping car you must pay about $2.00 
a night. Seventy-five cents of this is for the use of the 
car, the blankets and the pillows, and the rest is for the 
use of the beautiful wood carving and inlaying with 
which the car is decorated. If you have rented a lower 
berth, you will find on the inside a small hammock large 
enough to hold a No. 4 shoe on an A last. Into this 
you may place your clothes, your overcoat, your hat 
and your valise, reserving your pocket handkerchief 
for additional bed covering. If you rent an upper 
berth, you must ascend by means of a ladder. Climb- 
ing to the top of this, you take hold of the curtain rail 
with one hand and the outer ring of Saturn by the 
other and draw yourself up until you can clasp one leg 



234 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

about the berth chain next to the wall. You then re- 
treat gradually into the berth sideways, after which the 
porter takes away your shoes in order to have evidence 
against you in the morning when he calls for his tip. 

Rules of etiquette require passengers to dress in the 
berths of a sleeping car instead of in the aisles. As a 
result of this, American contortionists now lead the 
world. Women often travel in sleeping cars, but the 
company doesn't encourage the practice. It has made 
the women's toilet room so small that only one woman 
at a time can occupy it, and if two women are in a car 
one of them has to get up at three o'clock in order to 
give both a chance to dress before breakfast. 

Sleeping cars are now so numerous that the company 
finds great difficulty in finding names for them. It has 
exhausted the names of countries, cities and operas, 
but if it will now start in on the names which passengers 
have called sleeping cars, it will be amply provided for 
all time to come. 



PROBLEMS 235 



CITY HALLS 

THE American city hall is a barometer of munici- 
pal honesty. 
Every American city is equipped with a city 
hall. It may not have parks, hospitals, playgrounds 
or boards of health, but it always has a city hall, and it 
usually owes money on it. 

The casual stranger can tell whether to button up 
his money in an inside pocket when arriving in an Amer- 
ican town by inspecting its city hall and inquiring its 
cost. If it appears to have been built of ordinary ma- 
terial and only cost as much as it looks he can linger 
with safety in that city. But if its cost indicates that 
sheet gold and powdered diamonds were employed in its 
construction he had better travel down the middle of 
the street and secrete himself in a manhole at the ap- 
proach of a policeman or city official. 

Building city halls is indulged in with passionate 
pleasure by city officials who have forgotten all ten 
commandments and have invented several new ones to 
break. Buying stone at jewelry prices, paying for 
solid silver and getting brick and installing furniture 
that cost $1,000 a ton and looks like thirty-seven cents 
is a favorite pastime with city hall builders in those 
towns who hold their noses at municipal elections and 
their pocketbooks forever afterward. Many crowds of 
earnest, impartial safeblowers have built grand city 
halls in American cities and have retired for life to live 
on the income thereof. And the worst of it is the city 



236 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

halls remain, and the citizens have to view them every 
day with humility and deep crimson blushes. 

Chicago is not a phenomenally virtuous town, but it 
built a city hall recently for less money than was ap- 
propriated for the purpose and has been proud about 
it ever since. On the other hand, Philadelphia has a 
city hall which reached 537 feet toward Heaven and 
smells several thousand miles higher than that. It is 
impossible for a Philadelphian to become haughty and 
noisy about his town, because whenever he attempts it 
some ribald citizen of elsewhere asks him how much his 
city hall cost. 



PROBLEMS 237 



OUR STANDING ARMY 

THE standing army of the United States is the 
greatest in the world. 
There are statisticians who will indignantly 
deny this, but this is because they ride home in auto- 
mobiles at night, and do not know how the other f orty- 
ninc-fiftieths of us live. 

Our standing army consists of upwards of 5,000,000 
people. Thanks to American chivalry, most of these 
are men. Some of us stand only a mile or so each day, 
while others stand ten miles a day, and have to transfer 
three times in the bargain. 

The discipline of the American standing army is mag- 
nificent. This is because it is drilled regularly, twice 
a day. Every evening in every American city, whole 
cars full of the army can be seen obeying commands. 
After a man has belonged for a while he answers the 
commands : " Step lively," " Move up in front," and 
" Take the next car," like a well oiled machine. 

Many members of the army are splendid athletes. 
Nothing is finer for the muscles than standing army 
drill. A veteran will carry four bundles and a garden 
rake under one arm, hang from a strap with the other, 
and hold up two large men on his feet for hours at a 
time. 

The American standing army is very useful. It is 
used to build costly mansions and provide titled sons- 
in-law and other trinkets for street car magnates. 
When a magnate wants a new yacht or an old master, 



238 SIZING UP UNCLE SAM 

he takes a few cars off his line and thus increases his 
standing army. In New York as many as 200 members 
of the army are often crowded into a single car. This 
is accomplished by other members of the army who are 
trained to push on them from behind. Sometimes the 
cars burst, and sometimes the patrons do. The former 
is considered more unfortunate by the company. New 
York magnates are very kind to their standing army, 
however, and have recently put sanitary straps in their 
cars. New York is the only city where the standing 
army has a regular waiting list each night. This is be^ 
cause women are allowed to belong to it, however. 

Contrary to custom in other countries, the American 
standing army draws no pay. On the contrary, it pays 
for the privilege of standing. This leads to the belief 
that the army would not be worth two bits in time of 
war. An army which pays five cents per head for the 
privilege of hanging from a strap, and being punched 
in the back by a conductor, would probably thank the 
enemy with tears in its eyes while it was being kicked 
off the field of battle. 



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